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THE YOUNG IDEA 



THE 
YOUNG IDEA 

An Anthology of Opinion Concerning the 

Spirit and Aims of Contemporary 

American Literature 



BY 
LLOYD R. MORRIS 




New York 

DUFFIELD AND COMPANY 

1917 



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JA 



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Copyright, 1917, by 
DUFFIELD AND COMPANY 




MAY II 1917 

©CU460730 



NOTE 

The thanks of the author are due the 
following editors and publishers for permis- 
sion to reprint in the present volume mate- 
rial copyrighted by them: To Messrs. 
Henry Holt and Company, for the use of 
the essay by Mr. Louis Untermeyer, a com- 
pilation of three causeries which originally 
appeared in the Review of Reviews, the Chi- 
cago Evening Post and the New York 
Evening Post, published in pamphlet form 
by Henry Holt and Company as "The New 
Spirit in American Poetry:" To Mr. Mitch- 
ell Kennerley, for the use of several para- 
graphs from Mr. John Curtis Underwood's 
"Literature and Insurgency:" To the edi- 
tors of the North American Review for the 
privilege of reprinting Mr. Arthur Davison 
Ficke's essay, "Modern Tendencies in 
Poetry:" To Mr. William Marion Reedy 
for permission to reprint "Home Rule in 
Poetry," by Mr. Vachel Lindsay, from 
Reedy' s Mirror. 



CONTENTS 



Introduction i 

I The Empiricists : The Renascence of Com- 
mon Experience - - - - 3 

Conrad Aiken 7 

Witter Bynner 10 

Will Levington Comfort - - 11 

Max Eastman 15 

Donald Evans 18 

John Erskine 20 

Arthur Davison Ficke - - - 22 

Vachel Lindsay 47 

Harriet Munroe 56 

James Oppenheim - - - - 66 

Louis Untermeyer - - - - 72 

Margaret Widdemer - - - 90 

II The Romanticists 97 

(1) Imagism 100 

John Gould Fletcher - - - - 100 

Amy Lowell 110 

(2) Spectrism 114 

Anne Knish 114 

Emanuel Morgan 116 

vii 



viii CONTENTS 

III The Idealists : The Renascence of Spirit- 

uality 121 

William Rose Benet 123 

Joyce Kilmer 128 

Josephine Preston Peabody - - - - 134 

Ridgely Torrence 140 

IV The Pessimists 145 

Benjamin De Casseres 145 

Floyd Dell 147 

Donald Marquis - 149 

John Curtis Underwood ----- 150 

V The Traditionalists 173 

Fannie Stearns Gifford 174 

Louis V. Ledoux ------- 177 

John G. Neihardt 188 

Edward Arlington Robinson - - - 193 

Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff - - - 196 

Thomas Walsh 198 

Conclusion 205 



THE YOUNG IDEA 



INTRODUCTION 

The Young Idea is an outgrowth of the 
widespread revival of interest in literature, 
and more especially in poetry, which, during 
the past few years, has afforded one of the 
most arresting phenomena in the entire 
course of our literary history. This literary 
revival has brought with it a fresh content 
and many innovations in form, and of these 
much has been written in interpretation by 
critics of literature, and, frequently, by the 
authors and poets who have been concerned 
with establishing the ideals of what has been 
called the "new literature." But in some 
degree these various critical discussions and 
explanations have lacked co-ordination, and, 
while Mr. Braithwaite's annual anthology 
has provided the basis for a survey of the 
x* 



xii INTRODUCTION 

yearly accomplishment of the poets, there 
has been no attempt made thus far to pro- 
vide its complement in criticism, a collective 
statement of the ideals and the ideas upon 
which rests the work of contemporary Amer- 
ican writers. Moreover, the confusion with 
which the public has received the work of 
the more radical of these innovators has been 
paralleled, in some instances, by the dismay 
of the critics confronted with a literature 
with whose fundamental contentions they 
were unacquainted. 

It is to fill this void that The Young Idea 
has been compiled. Any ambitious critic who 
would interpret the ideals which are finding 
expression in contemporary American writ- 
ing, would, in doing so, hold himself open 
to the charges of misconception and of lack 
of receptivity. How, then, solve the dilemma 
otherwise than by requesting from each in- 
dividual author a statement of his or her 
ideals, a definition of the essential intention 
of his or her art? 

This was a solution which apparently had 



INTRODUCTION *& 

not heretofore recommended itself to the 
critics. And so the following letter was sent 
out: 

My dear Mr. 

I am compiling a statement of opinion by 
the younger groups of American writers 
concerning the contemporary and future 
temper of our literature. I believe that such 
a statement would possess sound value as 
creative criticism and would center public 
attention upon the ideals of the generation 
in between. A well-known publisher has 
offered to take the book, believing as firmly 
as myself in the value of such a symposium 
in clarifying the ideals and determining the 
essential direction both of the literature that 
is being written to-day and that which lies 
in the dreams and aspirations of our writers. 

Will you not, then, aid me in my investi- 
gation by contributing a reply to the follow- 
ing questions? 

Do you believe that there is manifest to- 
day a new movement in our literature? If 



xiv INTRODUCTION 

so, what are its ideals? What relation does 
it bear to the immediate past? Which of its 
many currents seem to you to be the most 
important? What relation does your own 
work bear to this new movement? What 
is your criticism of contemporary American 
literature? 

I shall hold myself deeply indebted to you 
for your valued opinion concerning these 
questions, which appear to me to be both 
important and interesting. Please feel free 
to reply to them, either directly as I have 
stated them, or to view the subject in a dif- 
ferent light. In a word, where does our 
literature stand to-day, and whither is it 
going? 

Whatever you say will be published in 
exactly your own words, over your own sig- 
nature, and there will be an introductory and 
concluding essay dealing with the question 
as a whole. I am endeavoring to make this 
inquiry as serious as possible, and as repre- 
sentative of the ideals of our writers of to- 
day and tomorrow. 



INTRODUCTION xv 

I am enclosing herewith a stamped and 
addressed envelope, hoping that you will find 
it convenient to favor me with your opinion. 
May I not call your attention to the im- 
portance of your individual opinion to the 
investigation as a whole, and respectfully 
urge you to favor me with it? 

It was sent, not to those writers of whom, 
because of our long acquaintance with their 
art, it may without presumption be predicted 
that their philosophies are accomplished facts 
and that their work is likely to suffer little 
change in the future, but to those writers 
who, since they are shaping our contempo- 
rary literature by expressing the spirit of 
today, are also in a measure illuminating 
our literary ideals of tomorrow. It is in this 
sense that this little book justifies its claim 
to be an expression of the young idea. For 
it is only in the degree that we are aware 
of what our quest is today, that we may 
hope for enlightenment of the spirit of the 
immediate future, 



xvi INTRODUCTION 

The response to this inquiry has been most 
gratifying, and the authors whose contribu- 
tions to the investigation appear in the body 
of this book have co-operated generously 
by stating frankly what they are about. The 
fact that absolute freedom of statement was 
a condition of the inquiry accounts for the 
disparity in length between the various con- 
tributions. 

A word must necessarily be said in ex- 
planation of the grouping of the contribu- 
tions. As I read the replies, I discovered 
certain outstanding ideas so strongly em- 
phasized that, when they appeared common 
to the points of view of several of the writers, 
they suggested the divisions because of an 
essential unity of direction. 

Thus, for example, the writers who have 
been grouped as The Empiricists have indi- 
vidually emphasized as the most important 
content of their art a concern with the com- 
mon experience of contemporary American 
life. The Idealists share the belief that the 
most significant tendency in our contempor- 



INTRODUCTION xvii 

ary poetry is its return to primitive faith and 
its expression of spiritual experience. 

The chapter called the Romanticists in- 
cludes expressions of the philosophy of 
two movements whose existence is defi- 
nitely admitted ; the oldest and the youngest 
of those groups of contemporary poets who, 
holding certain ideals in common, have 
formed schools and promulgated consistent 
programs. And since both of these schools 
have been, in their art, concerned chiefly with 
the extension of poetic form, always a ro- 
mantic revolt, I have grouped them as Ro- 
manticists. The Pessimists are those who 
find nothing of any essential importance in 
contemporary American letters ; and one of 
them grounds his pessimism upon a flagellat- 
ing denunciation of our contemporary na- 
tional life. The Traditionalists, I think, re- 
quire no explanation. 

I hope that the readers of this little book 
will derive from it a fuller understanding of 
the aims and of the ideals of our own contem- 
porary writers. For if we believe that lit- 



xviii INTRODUCTION 

erature is a record of and a reaction to ex- 
perience, we shall learn from our writers 
what it is, in thought and in feeling, that 
we stand for as a nation. Our literature has, 
quite obviously, been undergoing certain 
changes; and we should discover whether 
these changes are the expression of a parallel 
process taking place in our national con- 
sciousness and in our national experience. 
If we find that they are, we must believe 
that we are in a period of transition between 
old ideals and new ones. And, should we 
find this to be the case, it is to our writers 
that we must look for the light wherewith 
we may see the ideals of tomorrow. 

Lloyd R. Morris. 



THE EMPIRICISTS: 

THE RENASCENCE OF COMMON 
EXPERIENCE 



THE EMPIRICISTS 

Empiricism as a philosophical doctrine 
implies actual contact with experience; in 
its strictest form it claims that all knowledge 
is derived from experience through the 
senses. It would be unfair, however, to 
adopt this term of philosophical usage and 
employ it as a generic description of a group 
of writers who share in common certain 
ideals, without explaining the significance 
which, in so doing, we attach to the word 
itself. 

The writers in question unite in express- 
ing a lively interest in the world about them, 
in how people in their time and country are 
living, and what they are thinking and feel- 
ing. They are concerned with the problems, 
social, moral, intellectual, aesthetic, which 

3 



4 THE YOUNG IDEA 

arise from an attempt to adjust American 
life to American ideals. As poets they are 
refusing to be bound by rules or traditions 
inherited from the past which would limit the 
subject-matter of their art. They are claim- 
ing the freedom of selection of the novelist, 
the right to deal with life as they find it, and 
in its own terms. And in so doing, they are 
bringing about a change in our conception 
of what actually is meant by the word poetic. 
In this discovery of the romance of the 
commonplace there is evident a riotous in- 
toxication. In the true sense of the word 
it has been a discovery, and the poets, having 
broken the bonds, whether fancied or real, 
which shackled them to a conventionally 
accepted relation to experience, have become 
drunk with life. They are experiencing a 
magic wonder at familiar things with some- 
thing of the same penetrating vision and in- 
stinctive truthful reaction we find in children 
who are called upon to adjust themselves 
for the first time to a new situation of which 
they have previously been told nothing. 



THE EMPIRICISTS 5 

Wonder comes with difficulty to the sophisti- 
cated soul. And the person whom conven- 
tion has taught what he should and what he 
should not see is likely to be ashamed of and 
to suppress the immediate and natural re- 
action to experience which either disconcerts 
or charms us when it is expressed by a child- 
like mind. These poets are the childlike 
minds of our day. They are discovering 
to us what we might discover for ourselves 
had we their vision and their courage. They 
are enthralled by the strange spell of their 
own time, by its science, its mechanical in- 
ventions, its laboring masses, its tremendous 
industrial activity, its new ways of living 
and thinking. The most thoughtful among 
them are asking its meaning in terms of in- 
telligence or spirituality, seeking to extend 
their discovery beyond the mere surface of 
common experience into the realm of the 
mind and the spirit, reading the contempo- 
rary in the light of the eternal. The others 
are content to record their immediate and 
instructive reaction to common experience 



6 THE YOUNG IDEA 

itself. But they share the instant and pres- 
ent quest of the pattern of daily life and its 
problems. 

Some writers in every age, perhaps, have 
made this discovery of their own times. But 
rarely before has the search and the discov- 
ery been so general, and the writers, as 
many of them here point out, been so busy 
in making the discovery of their own mind. 
The combination of conscious introspection 
and a naive reaction to everyday experience 
is one of rare novelty, and it has bestowed 
a peculiar flavor upon our literature. 
Finally, each age, in making its own world, 
is making a new world; and its discovery is 
each time a fresh discovery. 

So that this new spirit in our literature 
may be called the spirit of empiricism, and 
the writers who are expressing it are em- 
piricists, in that they are testing out their 
art in the light of common experience, and 
demanding of it that it shall express an 
honest and sincere reaction to our life, our 
thought and our feelings to-day. 



THE EMPIRICISTS 7 

Mr. Conrad Aiken, the author of "Earth 
Triumphant," "Turns and Movies," and 
"The Jig of Forslin," in the following letter 
clearly defines the fundamental intention of 
his art. But his letter is something more 
than a personal definition ; it is an exception- 
ally penetrating diagnosis of the contempor- 
ary state of American poetry. 

In one respect the literary situation in 
America today is an anomalous one. In so 
far as there is a definite revival of letters 
here, and I think there is, it is limited almost 
entirely to the domain of poetry. It is as if 
the poets had got tired of waiting for the 
novelists to take hold of modern ideas and 
modern conditions, to bring literature up to 
date, and had resolved to do it themselves. 
While the greater part of our fiction is still 
amiably superficial and romantically ideal- 
istic, with here and there such encouraging 
exceptions as the work of Theodore Dreiser, 
our poets have all of a sudden, and with an 
extraordinary simultaneity which reminds 



8 THE YOUNG IDEA 

us almost of the Elizabethan age, extended 
the claims of poetry in many new directions 
and with considerable success. Poetry has 
now appeared among the best sellers, and it 
would not be at all surprising, and, to my 
mind, a good thing, if poetry should to some 
extent usurp the field of the novel or of the 
epic — in fact, be restored to its original 
estate, with all life for its province, and all 
knowledge, too. 

Several distinct tendencies are manifest 
in this poetic renaissance. At bottom, two 
ordinarily antithetical currents are now flow- 
ing side by side: the romantic and the real- 
istic. Each of these two main currents can 
be divided into subsidiary currents ; there are 
conservative romanticists and radical, just 
as there are conservative and radical realists. 
Of the realists, Masters— to choose one ex- 
ample — is the most radical, both as regards 
form and ideas, and Frost, perhaps, the most 
conservative. Of the romanticists, I think 
it might be said that Fletcher is the most 
consistently radical — and the Imagists in 



THE EMPIRICISTS 9 

general — and there are many conservatives, 
with none outstanding. In general, I believe 
it can safely be said that it is the radicals 
of the two groups who are doing the most 
interesting work, the work most likely to 
have cumulative influence. 

These classifications are, of course, vague 
and perhaps unjust. Frost, for example, is 
conservative as regards form but radical as 
regards matter ; he imports into poetry much 
that would have seemed unpoetic ten years 
ago. 

Whether the romantic or the realistic will 
dominate, it is almost impossible to say. Do 
we want poetry to deal exclusively with a 
world of the imagination, a world of illusion 
and beauty? Or do we want to have it deal 
with man as he really is, illusions, disillusions 
and all? . . . Do we want work such as 
the Imagists give us, sensory phenomena 
presented discretely, unrelated to any cog- 
nitive functions, vividly descriptive, pri- 
marily static, — or work which aims primar- 
ily at an understanding of man? 



10 THE YOUNG IDEA 

Personally, I should like to see a fusion of 
the two : to see the romantic method — color- 
ful, sensuous, illusion-making — employed 
for a realistic end. I should like to see poetry 
become scientific in its search for truth, pen- 
erating, destructive, comprehensive; not so 
much desiring to find beauty as to be beauty, 
no matter what be the subject treated. Two 
cardinal principles should govern it : it must 
tell the truth, and it must be a work of art. 

Of Mr. Witter Bynner, Mr. Untermeyer 
has written that "he can get magic and meta- 
physics out of a Pullman smoker." It is in- 
teresting to note that he finds our present 
renascence of poetry a reaction against the 
influence of the nineties. 

There is a new vigor in poetry, he 
writes. As I see it, the people are respond- 
ing to a renewal of humaness among the 
poets; human subjects, natural language 
and vital impulses. We have been slowly 
emerging from the aesthetic vanity of the 



THE EMPIRICISTS 11 

nineties toward poetic health again ; and the 
public is quick now to perceive it. The pat- 
ter of the so-called "schools" of poetry will 
do no harm, I think; for they will freshen 
and diversify technique. But they are a 
side-show. And the three rings in the main 
tent are beauty, vigor and common-sense. 

Mr. Will Levington Comfort's letter is 
of peculiar interest in establishing the pro- 
pinquity of the viewpoint of the younger 
generation of American novelists to that of 
the younger group of American poets. His 
comment upon the effect of the moving pic- 
ture on the form and content of our fiction 
is worthy of serious consideration. 

A fresh and different vitality is manifest 
to-day in North American literature. At 
various points around us, dealing with words, 
colors, and the subtler tools, are active young 
workmen who, for the first time, in the full- 
est sense, may be termed "North American." 

The first characteristic of this new element, 



12 THE YOUNG IDEA 

these young, flexible and very vigorous 
minds, is that they are workmen — not 
laborers, not professionals, not primarily 
artists in anything, unless it be life — but 
workers first, and after that, novelists, poets, 
musicians, painters or politicians. 

They are not competitors. They have not 
forgotten the warm side of justice, but they 
knew well the stern face of compassion — 
they know that it takes Christ and anti- 
Christ to make a world. They are neither 
modest nor egotistical, being for the most 
part busy and intensely alive, which implies 
joy. They are not responsible for their 
parents. 

The great love-story has not been written. 
The few great love-stories of the world have 
to be pieced out by the imagination. We 
find that we have been told that they are 
great love-stories, but they do not stand ex- 
amination. The classic form will not do for 
the New Age. There is to be a new lan- 
guage — for literary handling. It may be 
called American, to distinguish it from Eng- 



THE EMPIRICISTS 13 

lish in the accepted form. It is to be brisk, 
brief, brave and ebullient — to meet the mod- 
ern modification all must reckon with — the 
screen-trained mind. 

American-mindedness, of itself now, would 
never accept a great love-story. It would 
be called "sentimental," if not lascivious. 
The average American is an impossible lover, 
making it incident to business. The real and 
the sham are equally above him. He would 
not know when to be exalted or when to be 
ashamed. He thinks his own passion is evil, 
and thus makes it so. The great love-story 
can only be written with creative dynamics, 
and can only be accepted by the few of cor- 
responding receptivity. There is nothing 
soft about true romance. Some passionate 
singer of the New Age will likely appear 
right soon, his story to have the full redo- 
lence and lustre of the heart, his emotions 
thoroughbred, his literary quality at the same 
time crystalline with Reality. 

The big adventure-story has not been done 
so far. The day of guns, horses and redskins 



14 THE YOUNG IDEA 

is over. Photoplays have developed such fic- 
tion resources to the limit, proving to those 
writers who were born to be modern that 
their full tales can never be shown on a flat 
surface. There will be undercurrents, over- 
tones, invisible movements, tensions upon the 
reader, not only from between the lines, but 
between words. The story-teller of the New 
Age may handle his theme in words of one 
syllable, but his tale will have an intensity 
scarcely to be explained — only responded to 
by minds which cannot be satisfied by two- 
plane production — minds which demand 
more of life than the camera sees. 

The real war-story of today, even for to- 
morrow, ought to arrive soon. This is an 
age for an epic. Some keen and compre- 
hensive mind will arise — a literary genius who 
will include the patriot, the anarchist, the 
poet, dramatist, humanitarian, theosophist, 
dreamer, judge and statesman — and tell the 
Story of War, a tale of trenches, kings and 
arms; blood, heroism and monstrous greed; 
vast, far-reaching causes and the slow, inev- 



THE EMPIRICISTS 15 

itable hell of effects — told from a viewpoint 
so inclusive that thrones are merely pawns 
in a Planetary Game. 

Inclusion is the first business of the writer 
who is truly allied with the modern element. 
Propagandists do not fill the picture. Yes- 
terday the knockers and agnostics — today 
the specialists and one-sided enthusiasts — to- 
morrow the embodiers, the includers. Whit- 
man is the arch-type for builders to come; 
Nietzsche the master- wrecker ; these are the 
guidons of the New Generation — the pillar 
of cloud by day, the pillar of fire by night. 

Mr. Max Eastman, editor of "The 
Masses," poet and critic, wrote some years 
ago an illuminating and beautiful book called 
"The Enjoyment of Poetry." His contri- 
bution analyzes the new movement in our 
life which he believes our art will record. It 
may be added that in his latest book, "Jour- 
nalism vs. Art," he has voiced his disagree- 
ment with the champions of the free verse 
forms. And, therefore, with respect to his 



16 THE YOUNG IDEA 

theory of poetic form, he ranks among the 
conservatives. But his criticism of the con- 
tent of contemporary art proclaims him a 
revolutionist. 

I think that the first three paragraphs of 
my review of a book by Rebecca West are 
an answer to the question you ask in your 
letter. I do not suppose there has ever 
been an age when there was not a "new move- 
ment in literature." And, as to literary 
movements as such, I am not so much inter- 
ested in them. But there is certainly a 
movement in our life today which will be re- 
flected in literature as contemporary life 
always is, and I think these paragraphs in- 
dicate my feeling as to what it is and what 
relation my work bears to it. 

"Every full-blooded young person has in 
his arteries a certain amount of scorn. Lit- 
erary young persons have usually directed 
this scorn against philistinism, the middle 
class monotonies, and any provincial obtuse- 
ness to those finer yalues discriminated by 



THE EMPIRICISTS 17 

the cultured and by those who possess Art. 
But in our day the full-blooded young per- 
sons have got their scorn directed against a 
more important evil — against the ground- 
plan of money-competition built on indus- 
trial slavery which orders our civilization and 
makes all our judgments of value, even the 
most cultured, impure. Indeed, we suspect 
everything that is called culture — we suspect 
it of the taint of pecuniary elegance. We 
have armed our critical judgment with Thor- 
stein Veblen's "Theory of the Leisure Class" 
— perhaps the greatest book of our day, for 
it combines a new flavor in literature with a 
new and great truth in science. This theory 
has taught us how to see through "culture." 
We know something about knowledge. We 
have been "put wise" to sophistication. 

Moreover, we have tasted an affirmative 
and universal sympathy with all realities of 
life that lies far out and beyond culture in 
the mind's adventure. We have drunk of 
the universe in Walt Whitman's poetry. 

And of "Art," too, we have our intolerant 



18 THE YOUNG IDEA 

suspicion — a suspicion grounded in the fact 
that the whole standard of judgment by 
which art is judged was evolved in the parlor 
play of a petty minority of the race left idle 
by the tragic and real bitterness of life's 
experiences accorded to the majority who 
never spoke. We have read Tolstoy's great 
mad indictment of European art. We have 
made ready to knife the whole canvas, if 
necessary, in favor of a coarser and more 
universal reality. That is the direction in 
which our blood is coursing. We are rilled 
with scorn, as every young builder is filled 
with scorn. But our scorn makes of us rank 
and democratic revolutionists instead of 
over-exquisite and rather priggish aesthet- 
ics." 

Mr. Donald Evans disagrees with Mr. 
Bynner as to the ancestry of our contem- 
porary literature. He finds it to be the 
direct heir of the movement of the nineties. 
His own work has usually been considered 
as being one of the most radical contribu- 



THE EMPIRICISTS 19 

tions to modern poetry ; he, however, places 
it midway between the radical and conserva- 
tive currents. 

There is undoubtedly a new spirit in 
American literature, but I should dislike 
calling it a "movement," because a "move- 
ment" is perforce self-conscious and artifi- 
cial, and I believe this new spirit is sponta- 
neous and unconscious. It is best summed 
up, I think, as the "voice of youth." Liter- 
ature today has burst the shackles of middle 
and old age which controlled it absolutely 
during the last half of the last century. To- 
day the writer wins a hearing in his twenties 
while his mind is still growing, expanding, 
and thus his work has all the charm of fresh- 
ness, illusion, contradiction, error, doubt, 
faith, intolerance, impatience — in short, all 
the charm of youth itself with always the 
promise of finer, larger things to come. 

The new spirit's most conspicuous ideal, I 
should say, is a healthy realism, a striving to 
express all sides of life, the "good and the 
bad and the best and the worst." 



20 THE YOUNG IDEA 

It is the true child of the brave and bat- 
tlesome "Yellow 90s" of England. 

Naturally, to me, poetry seems the most 
important current. Never has poetry had 
a greater role in letters. In the last two 
years almost as many volumes of verse as 
novels have been published. 

My own work is in thorough sympathy 
with the new spirit, steering, I fancy, a 
rather middle course between the radicals 
and the conservatives. 

John Erskine, Professor of English at 
Columbia University, is widely known as a 
poet and critic. He draws an interesting 
comparison between the attitude toward life 
of our contemporary poets and the novelists 
of the last fifty years. And his criticism of 
our literature is incisive. His essay, "The 
New Poetry," in "The Yale Review" for 
January, 1917, is a comprehensive study of 
the spirit of recent American poetry. 

Here are my answers to your questions; 



THE EMPIRICISTS 21 

I believe a new movement is showing itself 
in poetry today. I find it not only in the 
remarkable output of free verse and other 
kinds of verse, but in the growing attention 
to American life as a subject for poetry. 
It seems to me that the poets are taking some 
such interest in the world about them as the 
novelists have been taking in the last half 
century, and this new movement must be 
very largely an advantage to our literature. 
The attention to free verse I think fairly 
negligible — that is, I don't much care 
whether a man writes in free verse or in some 
other form, provided he writes poetry. It is 
perhaps unfortunate that so much attention 
has been attracted to the form in which verse 
is written today, when the question of the 
subject matter is so important. My own 
verse, I hope, shows an interest in what peo- 
ple are thinking and feeling today. It is 
meant, at least, to express the best thoughts 
and feelings that I have. My adverse crit- 
icism of American literature today would be 
that though there is this improvement in the 



22 THE YOUNG IDEA 

attention to life about us, there is still a feel- 
ing among the writers that literature need 
not be particularly thoughtful nor scholarly. 
Too much of our writing might be dismissed, 
I think, with the hard verdict of "empty- 
headed and shallow-hearted." The poets 
who ever amounted to anything in the world 
shared deeply in the ideas and in the feelings 
of their time. 

Mr. Arthur Davison Ficke is a poet, 
dramatist and critic, whose "Sonnets of a 
Portrait Painter" received wide recognition. 
In this letter, and in the essay which follows 
it, is recorded the faith of one who, although 
writing in the traditional forms, has shared 
deeply in the process of liberation which he 
describes, and is thoroughly informed of the 
new spirit in poetry. 

The only branch of American literature 
about which I feel competent to speak is 
poetry. In that field there has been of late 
so striking an awakening of interest that im- 



THE EMPIRICISTS 23 

portant new work may be expected. The 
manifest eccentricities and absurdities of the 
"new schools" are certainly no worse than 
the banalities and sentimentalities of the old 
ones ; in fact, the vigorous shock which some 
of these aberrations have administered to the 
moribund body of poetry is distinctly gal- 
vanizing. Goethe's words, used to describe 
the ultra-romantic excesses of French liter- 
ature in his own day, apply accurately to 
our present situation: "The extremes and 
excrescences will gradually disappear; but 
at last this great advantage will remain — 
besides a freer form, richer and more diversi- 
fied subjects will have been attained, and no 
object of the broadest world and the most 
manifold life will be any longer excluded 
as unpoetical." We are today experiencing, 
in poetry almost as markedly as in painting, 
one of those periodic outbursts of unbridled 
life by which alone can an art be kept from 
hardening into a fossil. 

English poetry of today is notoriously the 



24 THE YOUNG IDEA 

scene of an opposition which to some ob- 
servers seems the rebellion of new life against 
sterile and petrified forms, while to others 
it appears as the menace of anarchy against 
order and beauty. Almost as clearly marked 
as in the economic world, the conservative 
and the radical forces are at work. The mak- 
ing of poetry is the aim of both, but they 
march under two irreconcilable banners. 
One of these is the very modern attempt to 
find some new and more flexible form in 
which can be expressed accurately the hon- 
est and unsentimental poetry of the modern 
mind; the other is the effort to invest the 
raw vigor of our modernity with that glamor 
of formal beauty which marks the classic 
tradition of the older poets. Between these 
two camps a merry war is waging ; and it is 
an open question whether the impatience of 
the Revolutionists toward the Traditional- 
ists, or the distaste of the Traditionalists for 
the Revolutionists, is the greater. 

In any examination of the Revolutionary 
poetry, it is best to put aside this little quar- 



THE EMPIRICISTS 25 

rel and to approach the new poems as one 
would a theatre — willing to be entertained, 
but not determined to be. Some readers will 
take up the modern work with minds haunted 
by the ghosts of poets who died before the 
new poets were born; and these will find it 
difficult to regard the birth of poetry as co- 
incident with the origin of any modern cult. 
In fact, many lovers of the old tradition ap- 
pear to have great trouble in keeping good- 
tempered in the face of some of the claims 
made by the advanced poets. It would be 
well if these apoplectic critics would remind 
themselves that an open mind is acceptable 
to God and profitable to man. As they con- 
front the novel and sometimes startling at- 
tempts of radical enthusiasts, they might ad- 
vantageously recall history and be a little 
humble. The revolts of each rising genera- 
tion have always seemed to each passing gen- 
eration like perverse breaches of immutable 
laws ; yet time has often made it clear that 
it was only against the very mutable and 
sometimes stupid misinterpretation of laws 



26 THE YOUNG IDEA 

that the rebellion of the younger wills was 
directed. Thus the pathetic comedy goes on 
from generation to generation; and the old 
past fights bitterly against the rising tide of 
the young future. May heaven spare us the 
humiliation of acting so dull a part in so 
grotesque a drama. May we be ready to wel- 
come all in the new poetry that is beautiful 
even though it come dressed in an unfa- 
miliar beauty! 

On the other hand it would be a pity to 
abandon completely the attitude of the skep- 
tic mind — of the mind from Missouri. It is 
not wholly a sign of senility to demand evi- 
dence that the new is good before we discard 
the old. Change is, indeed, the condition of 
growth, in art as in life. But not all motion 
in the arts is progress, nor are all movements 
to be regarded as Crusades toward the Holy 
Sepulchre. In the arts, as in life, there are 
many blind alleys, many meaningless expe- 
ditions ; and no one wants to be tricked into 
adherence to one of these. Faith in the ne- 
cessity of progress need not drive the enthu- 



THE EMPIRICISTS 27 

siast to such a pitch of desperation that he 
joins every Coxey's Army that marches 
shouting through the streets. 

Whatever we may think of the new poetry, 
we must perceive in it four sharply marked 
elements. These are the demand for com- 
plete metrical freedom; the insistence on 
hard actuality of images ; the adoption of an 
attitude of humor, irony, or grotesqueness in 
even the most serious poems; and an abso- 
lute frankness and shamelessness as to the 
content of the poet's work. 

Of these elements it is the metrical free- 
dom that stands out most obviously. The 
extremists of the new school look with dis- 
trust on the established verse-forms. They 
feel that the constraint of any regular metri- 
cal system is an intolerable prison to the 
spirit of the poet. Following the example 
of recent French poets, they demand that 
the integrity of the poet's meaning be poured 
into song whose cadences are born solely of 
the moment's emotion and are not respon- 
sible for conformity to any recurrent order 



28 THE YOUNG IDEA 

of rhyme or rhythm. Such a theory pro- 
duces verse whose lines are of irregular 
length, whose dominant movement may 
change at any moment, and from which 
rhyme is usually absent. At its worst this 
verse is an abomination; at its best it is a 
very subtle medium for the expression of 
certain kinds of feeling. 

As all educated Revolutionists admit, 
though the name vers libre is new, the thing 
itself is not. In fact, it is a very ancient 
thing, which has been used admirably by the 
most classic of all the English poets, Milton. 
In the Choruses of Samson Agonistes he 
employs such free verse as no modern Revo- 
lutionary poet is likely to surpass. Hence 
if we protest against free verse, we set our- 
selves counter not only to the modernists of 
today but also to the classicists of yester- 
day. As Milton saw, regular rhythms do 
not fill every need. Not all themes fit them- 
selves into conventionalized sound-patterns. 
Sometimes, as in Samson Agonistes, an ef- 
fect of peculiar dryness and hardness is 



THE EMPIRICISTS 29 

wanted which regular verse would be unable 
to supply. Also there are cases in which 
life strikes the emotion of the poet in broken 
flashes — in swift chaotic fragmentary per- 
ceptions; and to record these, free verse is 
an unsurpassed medium. For all these rea- 
sons there is no sense whatever in the popu- 
lar objections that have been raised to the 
free verse of the modern poet. 

It is only with those who proclaim free 
verse to be the sole possible poetic medium 
that one has a right to quarrel. There are 
such poets ; and in their attempt to create a 
cult of free verse they make themselves very 
ridiculous. Because the carpenter finds the 
hatchet useful for certain kinds of work is 
hardly a reason for throwing the saw out of 
the window. Milton knew very much better. 
Though he used free verse when he chose, he 
employed the regular metres and the son- 
net in a manner that has not been surpassed. 
Great artist that he was, he adapted his me- 
dium to his purpose. He knew what all 
poets will be wise to recognize today; that 



30 THE YOUNG IDEA 

certain effects in poetry are wholly impos- 
sible without the use of regular rhythms and 
rhyme. 

The reason for this fact is derived from 
the very nature of the art. It is based on 
the absolute necessity of carrying the lulled 
spirit of the reader on waves of recurrent 
sound into a state of suspended conscious- 
ness — a kind of visionary trance in which the 
mind, deaf for a moment to the distractions 
of the world around it, will see singly and 
solely the dream which the poet puts be- 
fore it. The emotion-heightening, hypnotic 
power of regular rhythms and recurrent 
rhymes is in many instances the whole basis 
of that peculiar somnambulistic effect which 
is the special magic of poetry. Emotion is 
the secret of it all; and some emotions an- 
swer to the call of rhyme and rhythm as to al- 
most nothing else. Rhythm seizes the thread 
of one's thought as might a current, and in- 
tertwines with it, and draws it down into re- 
mote subterranean caverns of the spirit un- 
visited by the everyday consciousness. 



THE EMPIRICISTS 31 

The sole debatable question that arises is: 
How regular must the rhythm be to pro- 
duce the desired trance-like effect? When 
the degree of trance desired is not very in- 
tense, as in poems that keep close to the sur- 
face-details of observed reality, the beat of 
the verse may safely be reduced to a mini- 
mum. But when one wishes to lift the reader 
into regions of passionate ecstasy and to 
arouse the profoundest and most primal 
emotions, one will have to resort to a more 
powerful stimulus and carrjr the reader far- 
ther away from every-day reality on the flow 
of these hypnotic waves of sound. For ironic 
comments on the human comedy around us, 
for pictures of the common stage on which 
we do our little struttings, free verse is ad- 
mirable; but it will seldom serve to trans- 
port us to the heights of religious experi- 
ence, or to the depths of the black night of 
the soul, or to the sun-swept levels of beauty- 
drunken happiness. 

It is, in fact, difficult to escape the feeling 
that free verse, valuable though it is, is still 



32 THE YOUNG IDEA 

in some obscure way incomplete verse — a 
rudimentary and not a final art-form. Many 
poets will agree that one resorts to free verse 
chiefly when what one has to say is not com- 
pletely crystallized, or when one's emotion 
is not at its most intense pitch, or when one 
wishes to note down a series of impressions 
that have not yet fully combined into one 
concentrated pattern. For one case in which 
free verse has been used as Milton used it, — 
out of deliberate and conscious choice, — 
there are a thousand cases in which it has 
been employed solely because the writer had 
not carried the inner processes of compo- 
sition far enough to poetize his material com- 
pletely. When the mind is a blaze of sudden 
revelation, and the poet's theme glows into 
thorough transparency of white heat, he will 
usually find that what he has to say flows 
rapidly and perfectly into the smooth mould 
of regular verse-forms ; but when the inten- 
sity of his impulse is a little lower, and all 
kinds of comments, reflections, minor ob- 
servations, and clever plays of word and 



THE EMPIRICISTS 33 

thought are mixed with his truly poetical 
material, then he can give much more com- 
plete and appropriate expression to his idea 
in the less intense rhythms of free verse. 

The new poets have made no mistake in 
using free verse. Their only error has been 
in committing themselves to it with too blind 
an exclusiveness. 

Beyond the matter of rhythm lies another 
feature of the new poetry — that very inter- 
esting theory of writing called Imagism. 
The Imagists attempt to present to the 
reader a clear, exact, sharp picture of ob- 
jects and episodes; after this, they allow 
the reader himself to evoke from this presen- 
tation those comments, reflections, emotions, 
and overtones which form so large a part 
of ordinary poetry. The Imagist would not 
say "mournful waves" or "bleak coast"; he 
would refuse to comment thus: he would 

prefer "lead-gray waves" and "splintered 

I 

coast." He would attempt to find the pre- 
cise word "which brings the effect of the 
object to the reader as the writer saw it," 



34 THE YOUNG IDEA 

and would present his scene with that im- 
personal interest in the scene itself which is 
the peculiar characteristic of modern paint- 
ing. He would avoid all flamboyant words, 
all set phrases, and keep his speech hard, 
spare, clean-cut, economical. He would ex- 
press even the most general ideas, even the 
most abstract conceptions, by means of the 
concrete manner and the definite embodi- 
ment of beauty. 

This theory has great fascination. The 
practice of the theory by the professed Im- 
agists has, however, been disappointing up 
to the present time. The poems which fol- 
low are from among those which the Imagists 
themselves praise. Here is one of the most 
admired of Imagist productions, Oread, by 
Mrs. Richard Aldington: 

Whirl up sea — 

Whirl your pointed pines, 

Splash your great pines 

On our rocks, 

Hurl your green over us, 

Cover us with your pools of fir. 



THE EMPIRICISTS 35 

There is, indeed, a certain vividness of 
tumult expressed in this likening of the 
wind-tossed sea to a wind-tossed pine-forest. 
But it seems attenuated, over-stressed; and 
such a minutely treated theme for a poem, 
after all! Surely a morbid fear of elabora- 
tion has impelled the writer to resort to such 
a mere adumbration of her thought. It sug- 
gests an unwholesome -veneration for even 
the most fragmentary of her perceptions. 
Compare it with any of the short poems of 
that supreme lyricist, William Blake, and 
observe how thin it seems. 

Here is another Imagist poem by Mr. 
Ezra Pound, called April ; it is almost mean- 
ingless because of this same parsimony : 

Three spirits came to me 

And drew me apart 

To where the olive boughs 

Lay stripped upon the ground : 

Pale carnage beneath bright mist. 

The principle of hard conciseness has here 



36 THE YOUNG IDEA 

been carried too far. It is the method of 
Japanese poetry reduced to madness. But 
here is an incomparably better and perhaps 
a more characteristic specimen of Imagism, 
by Miss Amy Lowell ; it is called White and 
Green. 

Hey! My daffodil-crowned, 
Slim and without sandals ! 
As the sudden spurt of flame upon darkness 
So my eyeballs are startled with you, 
Supple-limbed youth among the fruit-trees, 
Light runner through tasseled orchards. 
You are an almond flower unsheathed 
Leaping and flickering between the budded 
branches. 

Thus the Imagist attempts to give you a 
clear, sharp word-picture of the thing seen, 
without making any attempt to tell you what 
emotions this thing evokes in him or should 
evoke in you. He hopes, by presenting just 
the right details, to make you do your own 
feeling, and to convey to you the implica- 



THE EMPIRICISTS 37 

tions of the scene described with a sharpness 
all the greater because of his withholding of 
his own comments. Of course, the Imagist 
is not unique in this aim. There is a perfect 
example of Imagism in Burns' line : 

The white moon is setting behind the white 
wave, 

and in Keats': 

The sedge is withered by the lake 
And no birds sing. 

In the words of these poets, however, the 
Imagistic passages stand in intelligible rela- 
tion to greater wholes; they are merely the 
bits out of which the artist composes his wide 
mosaic. The real Imagists, on the other 
hand, too often forget the whole for the part ; 
they too often are content to put down vivid 
little trifles as if they were completed pic- 
tures. Many Imagist poems are merely 
such fragmentary bits of color, such mo- 
mentary sketches, as a great artist puts 



38 THE YOUNG IDEA 

down in his note-book for later use in a 
larger composition. 

There is a third element very strikingly 
present in the new poetry: this is its revolt 
against sweetness and prettiness. It appears 
sometimes as brutality, sometimes as irony, 
sometimes as grotesqueness. As one might 
stamp, swearing furiously, out of some over- 
seented boudoir, — so many of the Revolu- 
tionary poets give expression to their con- 
tempt for the softness and sugariness of the 
older poetry. This is not an altogether new 
phenomenon; it has occurred before in all 
the arts as a sign of vigor and fresh life. It 
offends the godly, but it wakes them up. It 
is one of the healthiest signs in our modern 
work. Sometimes it takes a less violent 
form, as it did in the work of a poet who 
was in other respects a Revolutionist, — : 
Rupert Brooke, — and becomes an insistence 
on the ugly, the humiliating, the repulsive 
aspects of life. Tired of high-flown idealiza- 
tions and hothouse bouquets, Brooke shows 
us Helen of Troy in old age. 



THE EMPIRICISTS 39 

• . . . . a scold 
Haggard with virtue. 

Oft she weeps gummy-eyed and impotent; 
Her dry shanks twitch at Paris' mumbled 
name. 

This kind of thing has its tonic value; it is 
the other half of the story, the dark of the 
moon. And though it would be a pity if the 
vigor of the new movement spent itself 
wholly in grotesques of this variety, they 
show a healthy skepticism, a healthy con- 
tempt for the humiliating position of the 
human animal; and their place is just as 
legitimate as is that of the gargoyles grin- 
ning down from cathedral buttresses. 

Nevertheless, some critics have abused Mr. 
Edgar Lee Masters for the gloom and sav- 
agery of his Spoon River portraits ; and the 
other day a certain reviewer took a book to 
task because it was not "heartening," and 
because the dramatis personam of the lyrics 
were all "wise and bitter and weary and gen- 
erally disillusioned and disillusionizing." As 



40 THE YOUNG IDEA 

if it were necessary for a poet to write with 
a pie-smile on his face! One writes of life 
as one sees it; and the new writers, impa- 
tient with the shallow optimism of 

God's in his heaven, 

All's right with the world, 

are trying to set down their sense of the 
confusions and degradations and bafflements 
of life, as well as of its peaks in Darien. Mr. 
Masters or Mr. Carl Sandburg or Mr. Ed- 
win Arlington Robinson would produce a 
fine absurdity, indeed, if they attempted to 
write with that confident optimism which is 
perfectly natural to Mr. Vachel Lindsay, 
and which is the true and proper way for 
Mr. Lindsay to write. But Mr. Lindsay's 
work would have little value if its cheerful- 
ness were its only or its finest quality. 

This leads one to the last characteristic of 
the new poetry: its intellectual frankness. 
Until one stops to think about it, one does 
not realize how extensive the change in this 



THE EMPIRICISTS 41 

matter has been. Fifty years ago the tra- 
dition of English poetry was simply over- 
grown with a thicket of Victorian pruderies 
and reticences. The hypocritical sentiment- 
ality of Tennyson's Arthurian ideal lay upon 
Mid- Victorian English like a blight; and 
few writers except Swinburne, who cared 
not a fig for devil, man, or Queen Victoria, 
dared make beauty out of the soul's or the 
body's nakedness. Now all this is past. To- 
day it is possible for the sincere artist in 
verse to write of absolutely anything. He 
is no longer limited to that small seg- 
ment of life which might have been con- 
sidered proper for the sight of the Mid- Vic- 
torian young lady. He has once more the 
virile freedom of the Elizabethans, and may 
without fear or shame depict whatsoever 
aspect of life seems to his eyes significant or 
curious or beautiful. 

In future years it will doubtless not be 
possible for the dispassionate critic to take 
the new poetry quite as seriously as, today, 
it ta^kes itself. Such an observer may grow 



42 THE L YOUNG IDEA 

a little bewildered and even amused as he 
surveys our Schools and Movements — the 
Imagists and Vorticists and Spectricists and 
Patagonians and a Choric School, and 
Heaven only knows how many others. He 
will perhaps wonder wherein the revolution- 
ary element of all these Revolutions lay, for 
he will see clearly that all the elements of 
our new poetry are in fact very old elements. 
But if he stops there, he will be a very bad 
critic indeed. 

Something has really happened to us. The 
effort toward freedom from dead conven- 
tions, displayed in the new poetry, has a 
significance greater than any actual accom- 
plishment that the movement has so far pro- 
duced. There is a genuine spiritual liber- 
ation behind even the most fantastic of the 
new poems, and an honest effort to explore, 
to invent, to widen the boundaries of the art. 
Though the technical results have been so 
far negligible, the moral results have been 
large. Today men are writing more hon- 
estly, more spontaneously, more vigorously, 



THE EMPIRICISTS 43 

than at any time during the last quarter- 
century; they are writing joyfully and 
shamelessly ; they recognize no authority that 
cannot justify itself, no dogmas that are not 
lighted by living faith. They are trying to 
express real feelings and to devise patterns 
of verse appropriate to this expression. 

A few years ago, men with no deep power 
over either thought or form were busily fill- 
ing the magazines with sweet characterless 
rubbish. Since the death of the great Vic- 
torian poets, they had used the whole Ten- 
nysonian machinery in a facile, spiritless, 
over-ornamented way, without any of that 
underlying greatness of spirit which made 
this rather absurd machinery forgivable in 
the hands of Tennyson. People had come 
to think that regular rhythms, rhymes, and 
a good deal of talk about "azure argosies" 
and "hillside vernal" and "argent pano- 
plies" and "light supernal" constituted the 
badge of the modern poet; and that fine 
poetry had really died with Queen Victoria. 

Then came the Revolution. It came as a 



44 THE YOUNG IDEA 

part of that general revolution which has 
been working upheaval in all the arts. Our 
day has seen every artist, be he musician, 
painter, sculptor, or poet, forced to take 
stock of his soul's goods and to look around 
him with fresh eyes. We have seen in music 
the growth of a new order of composition — 
an order in which the formal patterns of 
Mozart and Beethoven seem shattered into 
strange discontinuous tones, imperfect satis- 
factions of the waiting ear, discords as haunt- 
ing as they are unexpected. In the field of 
painting, men whom we can no longer dis- 
miss with a nod as charlatans, — men like 
Cezanne and Matisse, — have been abandon- 
ing the hard-won classic perfection of Titian 
and Raphael, and have been insisting that 
the painter must return to the freshness and 
integrity of his own emotional perception 
of nature, in all its starkness and crudity. 

Even so in poetry, this revolution has 
worked in salutary ways. It shattered the 
illusion that all the poets were dead, and 
that the pseudo-Tennysonian poetry of the 



THE EMPIRICISTS 45 

magazines remained as their sole relique on 
earth. The Revolutionists demanded true 
feeling and appropriate expression instead 
of empty rhetoric. They assaulted the great. 
They tried preposterous experiments. They 
made the world feel that there was, after 
all, dynamite and a volcano at the heart of 
poetry. For this, let us give them profound 
thanks. 

But after we have given them this, their 
intensity of effort need not make us feel that 
the stars of our youth have gone out. These 
insurgencies have not touched the glory of 
Milton or Shelley or Shakespeare. The old 
beauty remains beautiful, though it does not 
flatter us with the sense that we have dis- 
covered its secret for the first time today; 
and the principles of aesthetic creation en- 
dure precisely as they were in the days of 
King David the Psalmist. In the arts, lib- 
erty is not all, nor all-important. There is 
no virtue in just the free and untrammeled 
expression of our personalities, in free verse 
or any other verse ; the root of the matter is 



46 THE YOUNG IDEA 

to discover and use that medium, that pat- 
tern and rhythm, into which our personal 
emotion can be poured and there take on the 
lineaments of an impersonal and intelligible 
beauty. It is of very little consequence if 
you or I cry out our hearts; it is of great 
consequence if we can turn our hearts' cry 
into the measures of a perfect song. In any 
art, nothing ultimately matters but the 
aesthetic element; and the aesthetic element 
is not necessarily inherent in even the most 
sincere and spontaneous outpouring of feel- 
ing. Liberty from formal restraint is there- 
fore worthless unless it leads to some further 
and finer discovery of formal law. The chief 
danger of the new poetry is that it often 
seems in its practice to forget this positively 
platitudinous axiom. Form! — it is every- 
thing. Not in the stupid academic sense of 
precedented models, but in the sense of that 
fine harmony between the artist's meaning 
and his manner which is the parallel of those 
rare human moments when there is achieved 
a real concordance of body and soul. 



THE EMPIRICISTS 47 

Mr. Vachel Lindsay was among the van- 
guard of the prophets of revolt in our poetry. 
His "Adventures While Preaching the Gos- 
pel of Beauty," a record of his vagabond 
journey through the Middle West, records 
his faith in the influence of poetry upon the 
common man, a faith which he has put to the 
test of proof. 

He says: There is a wave of interest in 
verse going across the country. America is 
beginning to professionalize, institutionalize 
and nationalize a new group of laureates. 

The Century Magazine for March, 1916, 
said : "There are one hundred poets in Amer- 
ica today, excellent craftsmen, vivid adven- 
turers, known and unknown." 

Some of these people have been writing 
for a generation. The public, however, re- 
fused until today to read any of their books. 
Only one excuse was offered. The verse 
of these poets was not "great." 

It was a particularly cruel and unreason- 
able standard, when applied to the village 



48 THE YOUNG IDEA 

poet. His rhyme was sometimes printed by 
the most fastidious magazines. That should 
have been enough for a standing in the home- 
town. Certainly it was not required of the 
young fellow with a law school education 
that he have ten years of emenince as Chief 
Justice of the Supreme Court before he be 
trusted with the local legal business. Yet 
many of the hundred who are now emerging 
were these village poets, hung, drawn and 
quartered by the Christian Endeavor So- 
ciety, the Y. M. C. A., the Labor Union and 
the Country Club alike, because, as it was 
implied, they could not prove themselves 
Homer, Shakespeare, Milton and Whitman 
combined. 

But the real reason of the taboo was that 
the tyrannous majorities disliked all poetry. 
There were two causes for this. First: 
American fldgits. Second: the way verse 
was taught in the public schools of the last 
generation. The teachers did not many of 
them love the art. It was the custom to use 
it as a grindstone, as a sharpener of the wits. 



THE EMPIRICISTS 49 

This gift of the gods, whose name for little 
children should have been as springtime and 
wildflowers, became in the eyes of the Amer- 
ican babies a mysterious rack on which the 
mind was tortured. Every poem was trans- 
formed into a prose exercise in reasoning or 
an experiment in scanning. The child was 
always taught to read past the rhyme and 
ignore it. He was shown the alleged won- 
derful trick of stopping for breath at the 
middle of the line, and reading past the 
rhyme as fast as possible. Yet, generally 
speaking, in every well-read poem there 
should be as long a pause as is given for a 
comma, wherever there is a rhyme. The 
child who singsonged the poem was the mar- 
tyr of poetry. He was absolutely right and 
he was reproved for it. 

The only poems allowed to penetrate the 
baby souls of that generation were the class- 
ics of the playground, "London Bridge Is 
Falling Down," "King William Was King 
James' Son," and "As We Go Round the 
Mulberry Bush ? " sung in concert and acted 



50 THE YOUNG IDEA 

by sturdy volunteers at recess. And no one 
in America appeared to know that was 
poetry. Poetry was something to pull a 
long face over, and give the name of the 
meter. 

The village poet should see that the entire 
teaching of verse in the nearest public school 
be related as closely as possible to "London 
Bridge," "King William," and the "Mul- 
berry Bush," and the child encouraged to 
sing-song his favorite poems with growing 
elaboration through the years. The village 
poet will find this generation of teachers 
quite willing to co-operate. Let the chil- 
dren go deeply into the cadences of "Hia- 
watha," Poe's "Bells," and "Horatius at the 
Bridge" and "How They Brought the Good 
News from Ghent to Aix," and, if possible, 
make them into their own folk dances. I 
have found this very easy to do with chil- 
dren from six to eighteen, and, of course, 
with older students. 

The college student should go deeply into 
the mystery of unrhymed melodies, and 



THE EMPIRICISTS 51 

evolve any procedure that will make the 
printed rhythms real. The new free verse 
requires an ear that is first elaborately 
trained in conventional rhythms. The people 
that like it best are apt to be those who love 
the old poets. 

.Young physicians and lawyers have empty 
offices the first few years, sometimes many 
years, and the versifier need not expect an 
easier time. Whatever the village poet's 
ostensible profession, school teacher, editor, 
ditch-digger, let him fight for local recog- 
nition as a minstrel, in any dignified way, 
and not wait for a hearing to come to him. 

And, like the preacher, let the versifier 
learn to vocalize his message. [Young di- 
vines, delivering their first sermons, act as 
poets generally do all their lives when read- 
ing their works. Every one gives a sigh of 
relief when the exercises are over. But here 
is a difference. The preacher tries again, 
because society expects it of him, and he ex- 
pects it of himself. The most brilliant poets 
go on whispering forever, claiming special 



52 THE YOUNG IDEA 

privileges, while there is scarcely a cross- 
roads pastor or small town lawyer of mid- 
dle age but can make a fairly acceptable 
presentation of such a message as he has, and 
hold three hundred with reasonable com- 
mand. 

"Getting into the magazines' ' is a diploma 
for which the bard should be thankful. It 
is worth striving for. But though the poets 
have been in the magazines all these years, 
no one for a generation has, as it were, read 
the diploma. Or, to put it another way, 
the accepted verses became end-page orna- 
ments, by no means taken with the same hu- 
man interest as the prose before or after. 
And as to remembering the name or style 
of a poet from one month to the next, that 
was incredible. Even yet the typical news- 
stand magazines list their contributing prose 
writers on the back of flaming colors, and 
are discretely omitting their rhymers. 

But Harriet Munroe, Edward J.Wheeler, 
William Stanley Braithwaite, Jessie B. 
Rittenhouse, Alice Corbin Henderson, Louis 



THE EMPIRICISTS 53 

Untermeyer, Alfred Kreymborg, Margaret 
Anderson, Max Eastman, Lewellyn Jones, 
Joyce Kilmer, William Marion Reedy, 
Francis Hackett, with their special publica- 
tions, reviews, magazines, anthologies, social 
groups or organized societies have served in 
tlleir various ways to lift the American poets 
out of the class of mere diploma-getters, 
stop-gaps, end-page decorators. Differing 
in a legion of amazing ways, of all schools 
of political and religious thought, these 
critics agree in a passion for verse. They 
have distributed living laurels of late, as 
well as some limp laurels. Let those who 
have hopes for the American soul, do them 
honor for this crusade. 

Now the lately-laurelled are in a sea of 
endless technical discussion as to what the 
pattern of a poem should be. It is as dreary 
as the ancient scanning of the ward-school 
pedagogues. But no one is attempting to 
work out what is more important; the pat- 
tern of daily life for the American singer. 
This is the thing the village poets must do. 



54 THE YOUNG IDEA 

Certainly they may need Bohemia for a sea- 
son. They may find Art allies worth while 
in Greenwich Village, that new East Au- 
rora, with its many new would-be Elbert 
Hubbards. 

But it does not behoove the true Jeffer- 
sonian American to break his home-ties for 
ever and stew away to nothing in the far 
country simply because in his early youth 
some one in authority praised one of his 
songs. 

Let the lately-crowned member of our 
poetical one hundred accept his dead diplo- 
mas and his living laurels as well. Let his 
henchmen insist to his neighbors that he is a 
verse-designer duly certified by both the 
official and the inspired authorities, and then 
let him set out to make over the spirit of 
his town. 

Our most outstanding examples of the 
local poet in the present decade are the late 
James Whitcomb Riley, who has given In- 
diana a soul, Edgar Lee Masters, laureate 
of all down-state Illinois, Carl Sandburg, 



THE EMPIRICISTS 55 

laureate of Chicago, Robert Frost, laureate 
of all north of Boston. 

There are too many poets in Greenwich 
Village. But there is room indeed for one 
hundred poets, properly distributed. That 
is but one for each million of inhabitants. 
A potential audience of a million should be 
spur enough for any man. It seems to me 
some of our young fellows are rather baby- 
ish, the way they huddle together. Why 
cannot they stand out alone and take the 
real winds of America, instead of snuggling 
in an imitation Latin quarter? There is 
nothing in the cornfields to frighten real 
men. It is not all important that America 
have "Immortal Bards." Poetic immortal- 
ity is an utterly false aspiration for the critic 
to awaken or for the unfortunate rhymer to 
hug to his breast. It is as bad as newspaper 
notoriety, as a motive. 

And it is still more absurd, when the poet 
does return to the village, for utterly un- 
known labor leaders, politicians, merchants 
or bankers to insist that their local singer 



56 THE YOUNG IDEA 

prove that he has won the admiration of the 
unborn of the whole wide world for all the 
ages to come, before he is privileged to sing 
the local songs. The village poet, the home- 
town poet, should rather aspire to an old- 
age veteranship, a standing that will count 
with his friends and provoke his enemies, 
we will say, at his seventieth birthday. He 
should be equal parts William Allen White, 
Eugene V. Debs and the nightingale. If he 
desires immortality, let it be among the chil- 
dren of his personal friends in his home 
town. I hope any reader of the Mirror who 
knows a poet that needs this message will 
not hesitate to clip it out and send it to him. 

Miss Harriet Munroe is the editor of 
"Poetry, a Magazine of Verse." A poet of 
distinction herself, she has made the maga- 
zine a center for the new movement in the 
art whose influence in bringing the work of 
the new poets to the attention of the public 
can hardly be overestimated. As her con- 
tribution to the discussion, she has chosen 
these editorials from the magazine. 



THE EMPIRICISTS 57 

I am moved sometimes to wonder at the 
narrowness of the field accorded to the poet 
of conservative public taste, as compared 
with the freer range granted today, as a 
matter of course, to other artists. 

The architect must pass with ease from 
cottage to cathedral, from the village shop to 
the skyscraper, and in doing so he may take 
his choice of classic, renaissance, gothic, se- 
cession, or catch-as-catch-can. The painter 
may paint figures, landscapes, marines, his- 
tories, mysteries, in any style that pleases 
him, from Rembrandt to Cezanne, from Ci- 
mabue to Kandinsky. Even the sculptor, 
despite the bulk and hardness of his medium, 
has the freedom of marble, bronze, terra- 
cotta, wax, wood, and many other sub- 
stances, and of all styles from the Chou dy- 
nasty to the futuristic dream in his own soul. 
And the musician— but his range is the 
widest of all : he may compose song or sym- 
phony, fugue or rhapsody, opera, fantasia 
or extravaganza ; and to express all the fine 
harmonies or riotous discords of his dream 



58 THE YOUNG IDEA 

he may call on hundreds of cunning instru- 
ments, singly or in miraculous unison, and 
on the human voice as well, and compel them 
to reveal him, whether he be Bach or De- 
bussy, Wagner or Schoenberg. 

And all these various extremes in these 
various arts the public admits to its streets 
and gardens, its theatres and concert halls, 
its museums and exhibitions. Indeed, the 
more violent the extreme, the more eagerly 
do we flock to see or hear, the more firmly 
do we believe that we must see or hear in 
order to bring our culture, or kultur, up to 
date and meet the cannonading future with 
a quiet mind. 

But the poet, the English-writing poet of 
today — what does his potentially vast public 
expect of him? His language circles the 
globe ; his era is cosmopolitan, enormous, full 
of newly released forces, of newly emerging 
ideas. He lives in a world which is wound 
in a net of rails and wires, of sea-ways and 
air-ways, a world of far kinships and inhu- 
man wars, of intolerable poverty and 



THE EMPIRICISTS 59 

luxury, incredible fellowships and isolations. 

To express the unprecedented magnifi- 
cence of this modern era, the unprecedented 
emotion of this changing world — to tell the 
"tale of the tribe" to the future, and thereby 
make the future as Homer and Dante and 
Shakespeare have made us, the poet has but 
one instrument — words. To use this in- 
strument adequately, to make it resound far 
and wide to the heights and depths of the 
human spirit, the poet has need of the utmost 
freedom and the utmost sympathy. He 
needs as large and as eager an audience as 
any confrere in the other arts, an audience 
giving him the widest liberty of experience 
in his effort to enrich his instrument, broaden 
its range, and break down the technical bar- 
riers between his art and the far-flung mod- 
ern tribes whom it must address. 

Yet, instead of such a co-operating public, 
what does he find? He finds an indifferent 
public, loath to listen at all, but demanding, 
if it does listen, close observance of the well- 
worn formulae of rhymes and iambs which 



60 THE YOUNG IDEA 

Chaucer imported from France in his scorn 
of the Anglo-Saxon tradition. If a poet ven- 
tures out of this classic park he is at once 
suspect; the public gives him up as mentally 
afflicted and leaves the paragraphers to diag- 
nose his malady. And even the more con- 
servative of his fellow-poets question his 
right to batter down sacred walls. 

Now, Poetry has frankly tried to widen 
the poet's range, to question conventional 
barriers, whether technical or spiritual, in- 
herited from the past, and help to bring the 
modern poet face to face with the modern 
world. We have printed not only odes and 
sonnets, blank verse dramas and rhymed 
pentameter narratives, but imagistic songs, 
futuristic fugues, fantasies in vers libre, 
rhapsodies in polyphonic prose — any dash 
for freedom which seemed to have life and 
hope in it — a fervor for movement and the 
beauty of open spaces — even if the goal was 
vague and remote, or quite unattainable in 
the distance. 

And probably we shall go on in this reck- 



THE EMPIRICISTS 61 

less course, whether the public gathers in 
great numbers or not. A certain public — 
small, perhaps, but choice — is gathering; of 
that we receive indisputable evidence every 
day. Even that satirical newspaper editor 
who turns one of our fugues upside down, or 
that other who gaily parodies imagism, or 
that graver one who points at us the finger 
of scorn — all these are more or less con- 
sciously our friends, for they are helping the 
public to WAKE UP, to observe that 
something, through whatever illusions and 
extravagances, is going on, that poetry is not 
a dead art, but a living one, and that the 
poet of today, like the liberator of long ago, 
WILL BE HEARD. 

The Book and Play Club had an "editors' 
night" last month, when spokesmen for vari- 
ous Chicago weeklies and monthlies uttered 
their pleas and plaints. It was mostly the 
same story — the difficulty of finding and 
winning over a public for art, for ideas, while 
the great, headlong, tolerant, American 
crowd huddles like sheep in the droves of the 



62 THE YOUNG IDEA 

commercial exploiters of this or that feature 
or fashion, this or that impulse or interest 
of the hour. 

Also it was a confession of motives and 
feelings. Mr. Alexander Kahn loved the 
Little Review like a sweetheart, the editor 
of The Dial admitted his aversion from its 
conventionality, and one and all longed for 
that free and enlightened weekly which shall 
outrank all other papers of whatever time 
or clime, and make Chicago the centre of 
the earth. Incidentally, there were more 
personal confessions. Mr. Edgar Lee Mas- 
ters, for example, told how the Spoon River 
'Anthology was conceived nearly a year ago, 
when his mind, already shaken out of certain 
literary prejudices by the reading in Poetry 
of much free verse, especially that of Mr. 
Carl Sandburg, was spurred to more active 
radicalism through a friendship with that 
iconoclastic champion of free speech, free 
form, free art — freedom of the soul. At this 
acknowledgment that Poetry had furnished 
the spark which kindled a poet's soul to 



THE EMPIRICISTS 6S 

living flame, and burned out of it the dry 
refuse of formalism, this editor, in her 
corner, felt a thrill of pride, and a sudden 
warmth of unalterable conviction that, what- 
ever may happen to the magazine now or 
later, its work can never be counted vain. 

After Poetiy, The Little Review, The 
Dial, Drama, etc., had confessed bitter strug- 
gles to keep above water, we were patted 
on the head and condescendingly put in our 
place as "uplift magazines" by one of the 
numerous popular monthlies which, though 
no one ever hears of them, go out from Chi- 
cago to eager millions. "We don't turn over 
our hands to get subscribers," said the charm- 
ingly complacent editor, "yet nothing can 
stop them; after two brief years of life we 
have two hundred thousand — thirty thou- 
sand new ones since October. I fear these 
well-meaning neighbors of mine don't give 
you what you want." 

As the audience laughed the mind of at 
least one editor transformed it, and multi- 
plied it by millions, until it included the vast 



64 THE YOUNG IDEA 

constituency of all those incredibly popular 
magazines. I saw as in a Piers Ploughman 
vision the myriads of "new readers" stretch- 
ing from sea to sea — the huge, easy-going 
American public following trampled roads, 
gulping down pre-digested foods, suspicious 
always of ideas, of torches, of climbing feet, 
of singing voices — a public which does not 
stone its prophets, finding it more effective 
to ignore them. 

But, strangely enough, the vision brought, 
instead of bitterness, a deep warming of the 
heart. Is it not the same old crowd that 
Langland saw — the struggling, suffering 
toilers who starve in body and mind, who 
clutch at any straw of comfort and follow 
any casual cry, who dream deep dreams 
which they dare not admit and cannot ex- 
press, who grope for beauty and truth 
through tinsel trickeries and smug falsities ? 
Are not the prophets one with them because 
the prophets are doing the same thing 1 — 
plunging with such lights as they have into 
the darkness ? Indeed, only the prophets are 



THE EMPIRICISTS 65 

aware of what all are doing, aware of the 
uncharted immensities against which our 
little human torches flicker and flame; so 
they alone feel the urgent impulse to lift 
their torches high, to cry aloud, to reveal, to 
lead. 

The crowd rebels against the universal 
theme of art — the littleness of man — or, 
rather against the abysmal contrast between 
his littleness and his greatness. In old Chi- 
nese paintings there is always some little 
weazened philosopher squinting at the cat- 
aract; and so in all great art stands the ab- 
surd, earth-bound, gnome-like figure of hu- 
manity facing the infinite with inadequate 
and unattainable dreams. Deep-buried in 
the heart of every man is some effigy of this 
figure, but most men are afraid of it, like 
to bury it deeper under conventional occupa- 
tions, sentimentalities, moralities, instead of 
permitting artists and prophets to unearth 
it and expose it to the pitiless light. But 
every man's heart, however perverse with 
ignorance, however cluttered with knowl- 



66 THE YOUNG IDEA 

edge, makes a secret confession of the truth. 
Poets and prophets, therefore — the beauty 
of art, the sublimity of truth — appeal to him 
not quite in vain; and the appeal must go 
on as long as the race endures. To the last 
trench and the last despair certain spirits, in 
whom the common human spark of love be- 
comes a flaming passion, must keep up the 
eternal impossible fight for souls, for a "king- 
dom of heaven on earth." 

Mr. James Oppenheim, novelist and poet, 
is editor of "The Seven Arts," a magazine 
of "American artists, American authors, 
American critics for America — possibly for 
a new America, an America waking to that 
self-consciousness which is the first step to- 
ward national greatness." Mr. Oppenheim's 
verse is an experiment in polyrhythmic 
forms. He submitted very courteously to 
an interview, the report of which, he was 
gracious enough to say, transcribed the out- 
lines of his thought with accuracy. 

"There are," said Mr. James Oppenheim, 



THE EMPIRICISTS 67 

"two important currents in our contempo- 
rary poetry which seem to be the result and 
the expression of two different conceptions 
of poetry. In the first place there is a strong 
English influence which has built up our 
New England tradition. The chief charac- 
teristic of that tradition is that it has con- 
ceived poetry as intellectual rather than emo- 
tional expression. We Americans, like the 
English, seem to fear emotion and the ex- 
pression of emotion ; we do not trust our feel- 
ings, and prefer to restrain them. As a re- 
sult, the content of the poetry created under 
the influence of the New England tradi- 
tion is almost wholly intellectual in its char- 
acter. The poet whose influence is today 
most strongly expressed in this poetry is 
Robert Browning. His dramatic lyrics 
have contributed, both in form and in con- 
tent, to the work of such men as Edward 
Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, and 
Edgar Lee Masters, who, despite the fact 
that he writes of the middle west, may be 
considered a transplanted New Englander. 



68 THE YOUNG IDEA 

In opposition to the ideals of the New 
England tradition there are a few poets writ- 
ing to-day, of whom I am one, who conceive 
poetry as being primarily an expression of 
emotion. They do not fear their emotions 
and they are not afraid of expressing them 
honestly and naturally; and one of the re- 
sults of this tendency has been a loosening 
up of poetic form. Poetic form is not in 
itself, however, a very important matter. It 
becomes important only after the poem has 
been written. Today we say that the Eliza- 
bethan dramatists wrote blank verse that for 
sheer beauty is unequalled in English liter- 
ature. But they were not, when they wrote, 
trying to write great blank verse. They 
were expressing themselves in the medium 
most natural to them. So today poets are 
writing, for example, in free verse because 
that is theway in which they feel their poems. 
The strongest influence felt by those of us 
who are in revolt against the New England 
tradition is that of Walt Whitman. But 
what influences us in his poetry is its content, 



THE EMPIRICISTS 69 

and we are influenced by his poetic form only 
as a result of having first been influenced 
by his poetic content. There are, on the 
other hand, certain contemporary followers 
of the New England tradition who have de- 
rived their expression, but not the content 
of their art, from the same source. 

One of the greatest dangers that threatens 
our contemporary poetry is the tendency to- 
ward localization. I feel that many of the 
poets who are writing today are deliberately 
representative of some small locality. Hu- 
man life and human emotions are largely the 
same everywhere; their identity is essential, 
their diversity only superficial. Therefore, 
the poet who wishes to express the life of 
any particular locality must first express the 
life of our country as a whole. The funda- 
mentally national, and only incidentally 
local vision, is the vision of which American 
poetry stands in greatest need today. 

The imagists have fulfilled an important 
function in demonstrating the importance of 
disciplining our language and in directing 



70 THE YOUNG IDEA 

our attention to exactness of expression and 
to the distinction of values in the use of 
words. They are, in this respect, our con- 
temporary purists. But as a theory of art 
imagism is foredoomed to failure, for it is 
tending toward a separation between art and 
life, and since art is a form of human expres- 
sion, there can be no divorce between life and 
art. The chief difference between the poetry 
of yesterday and the poetry of today lies in 
the fact that while the poetry of yesterday 
was an exercise, the poetry of today is an 
expression. 

If our poetry is to progress beyond its 
present level, I feel such progress will be 
the result of a more general revolt against 
what I have called the English, or the New 
England, tradition. Before our poetry can 
truly express our life we must rid ourselves 
of foreign influences, and become really 
self-conscious as Americans. The culture of 
other nations is both important and interest- 
ing, but it is far more important for our 
art to express our own culture and our own 



THE EMPIRICISTS 71 

life than the life and the culture of other 
peoples. Today poetry is undergoing one 
of its periodical returns to the soil; the 
poetry of our immediate past, the work, for 
example, of Thomas Bailey Aldrich and 
Richard Watson Gilder, was refined away 
from life as far as possible. The poets of 
yesterday tried to create an art remote from 
life. Today we are trying to create an art 
which shall express our own experience of 
our own life. And the most hopeful sign 
in our contemporary renascence of poetry is 
that it is, fundamentally, a renascence of 
common experience. I feel that contempo- 
rary American poetry has achieved in this 
respect a higher level than any other literary 
activity of today in the United States. I 
do not think that a parallel advance has 
been manifested in either the novel or the 
drama. But the poetry that is being written 
today holds out the promise of a literature 
which, if we concentrate upon our own ex- 
perience, express our life and our emotions 
in the form most natural to each of us in- 



72 THE YOUNG IDEA 

dividually, and write what we feel without 
fear and without reticence, will truly be a 
significant expression of American life." 

Mr. Louis Untermeyer is a prophet of the 
democratic spirit, and the social content of 
his art finds expression in a vesture of lyric 
beauty. He is, primarily, a singer, and his 
ever-increasing interest in social problems 
has in no wise diminished the beauty of his 
songs. In the following essay he enunciates 
that faith in the romance of the common- 
place which is the essential discovery of his 
poetry. 

The conservative of every age has been 
his own iconoclast. And often, in building 
on the time-eaten and treacherous timber of 
the past, he has brought down not only his 
idols, but the temple that contained them. 
Our thinking is improving architecturally. 
We blast deeper before building; we have 
become far more critical of the foundations. 
And, in getting down to bedrock, a hundred 
undermined and rotting formulas have been 



THE EMPIRICISTS 73 

exposed and demolished. Many are the pre- 
served and rooted aristocracies that have 
been threatened; and now, with the rush of 
unsuspected energies, comes the end of the 
aristocracy of the arts. And poetry, being 
the most patrician of all the crafts, is the last 
to become democratized. But the change is 
inevitable ; its advent has come upon us with 
the strange and sudden power of all things 
new. New, first of all, in spirit. Not since 
the classic New England group has Amer- 
ican poetry had so great an impetus and so 
full-throated an utterance. And never has 
that utterance been so rich, so free and so 
varied. 

Much of this is due to the fact that our 
poets are coming back to the oldest and most 
stirring tongue; they are using a language 
that is the language of the people. Nor is 
this a mere revolt from the stilted and 
aestheticized vision of life. They have redis- 
covered the beauty and dignity, I might al- 
most say the divine core, of the casual and 
commonplace; and they are bringing back to 



74 THE YOUNG IDEA 

ordinary speech that same beauty and dig- 
nity, calling forth its inherent warmth and 
wonder. Whitman, as much the prophet as 
the poet, foretold this in his little-known and 
highly characteristic "An American Primer." 
a thin sketch of a book which throws a series 
of illuminating sidelights on himself and his 
aims. In furtherance of his belief that the 
whole "Leaves of Grass" was a gigantic lan- 
guage experiment, an effort toward a demo- 
cratic poetry, he said: "It is an attempt to 
give the spirit, the body and the man, new 
words, new potentialities of speech — an 
American, a cosmopolitan (for the best of 
America is the best cosmopolitanism) range 
of self-expression." He wrote also "The 
Americans are going to be the most fluent 
and melodious-voiced people in the world — 
and the most perfect users of words. * * * 
The new times, the new people, the new vista 
need a tongue according — yes, and what is 
more, they will have such a tongue." 

And it was Whitman's use of the rich 
verbal material that flowered in the street 



THE EMPIRICISTS 75 

rather than in libraries that made him so 
remarkable. That large spirit was set free 
and made common to all men, not so much 
because of his form or his philosophy, but 
because of his words. And it was this love 
and sublimation of the colloquial and racy 
that made him so great an artistic influence 
— an influence that was not only liberal but 
liberating. It was Whitman, more than any 
single element, unless one includes the in- 
direct force of a wider social feeling, that 
broke the fetters of the poet and opened the 
doors of America to him. 

From what, it may be asked, has the poet 
been set free ? Let us say, in a sweeping gen- 
erality, from a preoccupation with a poetic 
past, from the repeating of echoes and glib 
superficials, in the first place. He has been 
transferred from a fantastic literary limbo — 
a panorama of mythological figures and 
moralistic scraps seen through a mist. And 
what has he been set free for? Well, for 
one thing, to look at the world he lives in; 
to study and synthesize the startling fusion 



76 THE YOUNG IDEA 

of races and ideas; the limitless miracles of 
science and its limitless curiosity; the grop- 
ing and stumbling toward a genuine social 
democracy — the whole welter and struggle 
and beauty of the modern world. He has 
been set free to face these. For even though 
he tries to recreate the tunes of an antique 
lyricist, listening only to the echoes of a 
thousand years, he will find it hard to escape 
his times. 

And that escape has become increasingly 
difficult. The wireless, the rural free de- 
livery, the ubiquitous and omniscient news- 
papers follow him everywhere. No matter 
how distant his hiding place, he cannot get 
away from the world's loud and restless 
activities; the tiniest hamlet reproduces and 
buzzes with the stress of the whole world. 
The retreat to the poet's ivory tower is 
blocked on every side. 

Not that the escape is impossible ; it is the 
artists' power and prerogative, and many of 
them have availed themselves of the priv- 
ilege. Like Keats, the poet may fly to a. 



THE EMPIRICISTS 77 

strange and soothing antiquity; or, like Poe, 
he may build and populate a misty No Man's 
Land. But unless he can make his world as 
actual and convincing as our own, he will 
have failed — even in his escape, and cer- 
tainly in his poetry. 

And it is this difference that is shown in 
the temper of the most of the living poets; 
they are not anxious to escape. They are 
not frightened or disgusted with their times ; 
they are fascinated by them. They are in 
love with their world; passionately, even 
painfully. It may be urged that this might 
be said of the first poets of any time ; that the 
artist has always been intensely interested in 
his age and has, consciously or unconsciously, 
reflected it. And, to a great extent, this is 
true. But, above all, what distinguishes this 
age from the preceding ones is its sharp, 
probing quality, its insatiable curiosity, its 
determined self-analysis. And it is not, as 
in the past, the spasmodic effort of a 
group or the rare interpretative power of 
one great mind that stands put, It is 



78 THE YOUNG IDEA 

the steady drive of the mind of man now 
turned in like a great searchlight upon 
itself. In every field, from the artistic to 
the political — one sees this restless search- 
ing, this effort toward new values, toward 
ascertaining its own larger possibilities. I 
said before that the artist had been set free 
for a clear look at his own age. It would 
have been truer to say that he is being set 
free for a clear look at himself. * * * Let 
us see by a few instances how far-reaching 
this eagerness, this introspection, really 
is. 

James Oppenheim is an excellent example. 
Even in the early "Doctor Rast" stories, 
with their sentimental solutions, and the ten- 
tative "Monday Morning and Other Poems," 
there was always apparent, beneath the 
stammering and the awkward lines, a strain- 
ing vision. And in his recent "Songs for the 
New Age" that vision achieves its fullest ex- 
pression. Rhapsody is still there, but it is 
rhapsody without rant. The old passion for 
landscapes and men and music and justice 



THE EMPIRICISTS 79 

are here also ; but it is lifted and clarified in 
a greater singing. And there is a new ele- 
ment — a slow searching that goes on beneath 
the musical and literary surface of all the 
poems. Beneath it, and, at the same time, 
beyond it. Psalms and prophecies these 
poems are, in form as well as feeling — the 
old Isaiah note, revived and lifted out of 
the crowded streets — but they are something 
more; they are an attempt to diagnose the 
twisted soul of man and the twisted times 
that he lives in. In this work Oppenheim 
reveals the world conflict reproduced within 
one's self; it is an attempt to assemble the 
elements of gigantic struggle and to syn- 
thesize them. 

Almost at the other extreme in manner 
and method is Edwin Arlington Robinson. 
His sharp, even rhythms and chiselled 
rhymes are the antithesis of Oppenheim's 
polyrhythmic lines; but a similar impulse is 
in them both. Witness the close-packed sense 
of mental struggle in the shorter poems in 
"The Town Down the River," and the psy- 



80 THE YOUNG IDEA 

chological interplay of character and envir- 
onment in "Captain Craig." Witness, also, 
the color and simplicity, sometimes the al- 
most baffling simplicity of his speech, as 
shown in his latest volume, "The Man 
Against the Sky." 

Or turn to a poet who has apparently noth- 
ing in common with either. In "North of 
Boston" Robert Frost sets down a series of 
scenes and incidents of New England life, 
and sets it down in a loose, blank verse that 
is so natural in speech that many missing the 
familiar, ready-made glamor, have taken it 
for prose. And it is in this very naturalness 
of language, in the constant use of the spoken 
rather than the "literary" word, that he 
achieves both poetry and revelation. In 
Frost we find the poet who extends our lit- 
erary borders not only with fresh sight but 
with fresh sounds. These sounds, let in from 
the vernacular, are full of a robust and cre- 
ative energy; they are red corpuscles to the 
thinning blood of our speech. Possibly in 
his "The Death of the Hired Man'" and 



THE EMPIRICISTS 81 

"Birches," to take two dissimilar examples, 
this vigor of words is most evident; but it 
leaps out of all his work with a restless, 
somewhat roundabout but always keen and 
plunging psychology. In his most recent 
work ("Mountain Interval") we find these 
same direct and distinguished qualities. But 
a new element is here — a warmer, even a 
more whimsical reflection of a life that 
seemed gray, and, even in its humors, grim. 
This geniality does not mean that Frost's 
penetration is any less deep than it was; it 
means merely that he has brought emotions 
nearer the surface. So with the unexpected 
lyrics in this volume; they emphasize the 
happier undercurrent by emphasizing the 
singer no less than the seeker. It is its differ- 
ences even more than its similarities that 
make "Mountain Interval" a worthy suc- 
cessor to "North of Boston." 

Scarcely less unusual is Edgar Lee Mas- 
ters' "Spoon River Anthology" — an inter- 
esting and remarkable work, although as a 
book of poems a greatly overrated one. For, 



82 THE YOUNG IDEA 

though he shares that same clarity and di- 
rectness of eye and speech with the others, 
"Spoon River Anthology," although it is 
notable as character drawing and drama, is 
often negligible in poetic power. At least, 
poetry is its frailest quality. For when Mr. 
Masters writes, as he sometimes tries to do, 
poetry per se, his fresh strength is mixed 
with a stale and mystical flabbiness. Most 
of the rhymed portions of his new "Songs 
and Satires" are cases in point. It may be 
that his sharp irony dulls the edge of his 
poetic impulse. Or it may be that Mr. Mas- 
ters is a sharp-eyed novelist and not, first 
of all, a poet. Compare his treatment of peo- 
ple, for instance, with Frost's. Masters, 
with great sophistication and almost constant 
disillusion, enjoys most of all the surface 
gossip of his folk; sometimes he throws a 
high light on one submerged motive or inci- 
dent (or a series of them) in his characters' 
lives. But Frost goes deeper; his light, less 
brilliant and less superficial, does not merely 
set off his figures. It penetrates them. It 



THE EMPIRICISTS 83 

reaches down through his people to their 
roots; it strikes the soil from which they 
grew. It even transforms the whole country- 
side and makes it something more than an 
effective background; it gives his setting the 
quality of an immense and moving actor in 
the lives of the folk it overshadows. 

Amy Lowell's recent New England dia- 
lect poems, done with her usual economy of 
line, have some of these qualities. Her vol- 
ume "Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds" dis- 
plays other but no less striking sides of her 
ability. Of all the women singers in Amer- 
ica (and there are at least a dpzen excellent 
ones) she is the most vigorous and individual. 
Her work blends very curiously a delicate, 
feminine whimsy, a love of diablerie and the 
grotesque with an almost stark, square-shoul- 
dered virility. With all these, and an in- 
cisive satire, she cuts through tawdry and the 
commonplace surfaces to hidden and beauti- 
ful depths. Swinging away on one hand 
from the soft sighings of her past and on the 
other from the rigidity of the Imagists' credo, 



84 THE YOUNG IDEA 

she has achieved a poise and a power rare 
among American poets of either sex. 

No clear perspective has as yet been al- 
lowed the Imagists themselves. They have 
suffered chiefly from two things; too much 
advertising and the larger group's hatred 
for the smaller one. But the infuriated 
critics of Imagism have suffered still more. 
They have for the most part fallen heatedly 
from their calm eminences by making the 
mistake of denouncing not the Imagist poets 
nor the Imagist propaganda, but the Imagist 
pronunciamento. Most of them failed to 
see that when they were attacking the 
Imagists' credo of "using the exact word"; 
of allowing "freedom in choice of subject"; 
of "producing poetry that is hard and clear," 
and of the "importance of concentration," 
they were attacking the essentials of all 
great literature. The Imagists, realizing 
the need for the constant re-statement and 
re-shaping of old truths, have repeated con- 
sciously certain fundamental principles ob- 
served by every poet more or less uncon- 



THE EMPIRICISTS 85 

sciously. And even their over-emphasis will 
have a salutary rather than a harmful effect. 
Discounting the inverted classicism that still 
attaches itself to certain poets of the group, 
in spite of the frantic convulsions of its more 
spectacular adherents and recent self-elected 
exponents, for all its occasional f ridigity and 
frequent exaggerations that spring from an 
unholy fear of the cliche, Imagism is a 
strong influence for good. It is excellent 
fertilizer in the fields of poetry; it will help 
nurture the new and stronger crop. It will 
do this since its very "hardness," its sharp 
edges and images, and its constant insistence 
on packing and cutting down are a vigorous 
and healthy reaction from the verbose, the 
carelessly facile and the pale, pretty reiter- 
ations of a rubber-stamp loveliness. 

The list of the "new" poets could be pro- 
longed for another page. Though only a few 
are mentioned, one must notice Vachel Lind- 
say, with his infectious combination of 
rhymes, rag-time and religion; his remark- 
able attempts to interpret the soul of a nation 



86 THE YOUNG IDEA 

through its sounds, and his efforts, to bring 
art, prohibition and Socialism (and his faith 
in this strange blend is not the least of his 
qualities) to the villages. Mr. Lindsay sees 
(and hears) poetry not only in Springfield 
and the moving pictures, but in negro camp- 
meetings and automobile horns and fire- 
engines and the United States Senate and 
a Chinese laundry. ISTor are his eyes and 
ears any the less keen when Mr. Lindsay is 
in a quieter and more meditative mood. 

But to proceed: John Hall Wheelock, in 
his "The Human Fantasy" and "The Be- 
loved Adventure," two volumes vibrant with 
"the warm recklessness of lavish life," is an- 
other of the poets who see "the universe made 
of dust, but holy to the core" ; his work glows 
with the realization of a "lovable, sordid hu- 
manity." In the first of these volumes is the 
splendid lyric "Sunday Evening in the Com- 
mon," one of the loveliest of pure American 
lyrics, with the exception of Poe's "To 
Helen" and Whitman's Lincoln elegies. 

Then there is Witter Bynner, who can get 



THE EMPIRICISTS 87 

magic and metaphysics out of a Pullman 
smoker; William Ellery Leonard with "The 
Vaunt of Man" to his great credit and a 
group of poignant sonnets ; Arthur Davison 
Ficke, another eminent sonneteer who stings 
his archaisms into life with the whiplash of 
a personality; Carl Sandburg, whose first 
volume, "Chicago Poems," shows him at 
times the most tender and at times the most 
brutal of our poets ; who proves Synge's con- 
tention that it is the timber of poetry that 
wears most surely, and there "is no timber 
that has not strong roots among the clay and 
worms." Plain speaking and outspoken, he 
uses words as weapons; but he can also use 
them as delicately as an engraver his tool. 
He has the etcher's power, with its firm, 
clean-cut and always suggestive line — but he 
is never merely the artist. His hate, a 
strengthening and challenging force, might 
overbalance the power of his work were it 
not exceeded by the fiercer virility of his love. 
Arturo Giovanitti, with his hot and raucous 
hymns of democracy, is another radical, min- 



88 THE YOUNG IDEA 

gling these two dangerous combustibles, love 
and dynamite. Also there is Clement Wood, 
another fiery poet of protest, whose first vol- 
ume is still to appear ; William Rose Benet, 
with his affections divided between stark 
modernities and rollicking chanties or weird 
ballads of a fantastic world; John G. Nei- 
hardt, Maxwell Bodenheim, Eunice Tiet- 
jens, Margaret Widdemer, Harriet Monroe, 
Helen Hoyt, Max Eastman — and a dozen 
other strangely contrasted artists could be 
added. 

And though all these poets differ in choice 
of theme, in method and in temper, still they 
are united by a definite though a loose bond. 
Each of these poets respond to and reflect 
the two strangely creative powers of our day 
— its restlessness and analysis. Each poet 
is an active part of a new impetus and fervor ; 
in his love for his times he is revealing both 
himself and his age. He is determined to 
know his world and to realize it completely. 
He does something more than accept a shop- 
worn glamor and formulas of beauty that 



THE EMPIRICISTS 89 

have been handed down to him ; he questions 
them. He is going to look for beauty for 
himself everywhere, in strange places pos- 
sibly; but he is going to find it. And he 
is going to wrest it from the neglected and 
trivial — even out of the dark cavern of the 
ugly and the subconscious. For it is this in- 
tense love for the whole world, not a part of 
it, that impels and uplifts him. He sees the 
amazing vitality beneath what seems merely 
vociferous; he knows the health that is in 
the heart of vulgarity. And it is this burn- 
ing intensity, this analysis, that sharpens and 
vivifies all incidents and emotions; that re- 
veals the ordinary in fresh and shining colors. 
There are poets, no doubt, who still can be 
unstirred by these things within his world. 
But the poet to-day who definitely desires to 
escape them is rare, a creature to be won- 
dered at rather than to be scorned. He is 
not exactly a coward. He is much too be- 
wildered and half-hearted to be that. He 
is an anachronism. For poetry is something 
more than a graceful, literary escape from 



90 THE YOUNG IDEA 

life. It is a spirited encounter with it. 

Miss Margaret Widdemer, a writer of 
both verse and prose, writes illuminatingly 
of the relation of the contemporary poet to 
the world about him. 

There unquestionably is a new movement 
in our literature today ; a distinct effort to 
formulate and realize ourselves and our re- 
lation to life in the present, as differing from 
the old feeling which, more or less differently 
phrased, the writers of other times have felt, 
of "writing for eternity." The older idea, 
I think, was to write, if the work was serious 
at all, of the eternal verities, the things which 
were and would be changeless, and were of 
no time. What reflection of the moment's 
thought was in their work was more or less 
an involuntary thing, though to this unin- 
tentional reflection of the psychology of the 
moment many of the older writers owe what 
place remains to them in the present. We 
have come to the place where our civiliza- 



THE EMPIRICISTS 91 

tion is becoming self-conscious, and record 
its own attitude of mind, knowing this to be 
a thing as worthy of record as any attitude 
of mind we may glean from writers of other 
periods. We are realizing that romance, and 
the battle between good and evil, is here with 
us, not locked on shelves with book-people in 
costume, and are self-consciously evoking it. 
This is the most important feeling — in- 
deed, the main feeling — of today's literature. 
It has its good and evil side, as any self- 
consciousness has. We are in danger of com- 
ing to feel that our view is the only view, our 
age the only age, and, in our anxiety to lose 
false glamor and false relations, lose the 
True Romance, and drop into a fashion of 
making our books laborious patchworks 
made out of little pieces of meaningless, aim- 
less realities, as futile as a Futurist color- 
scheme. If we can show that the little scraps 
and pieces of our lives today will eventually 
make a thing which is as real and worth- 
while and great as any of the old great ro- 
mances we are creating something which is 



92 THE YOUNG IDEA 

epic and lasting. In these alternatives lie 
our danger and our capability of success. 

As to my own work, I think that any work 
which bears a deliberate and self-conscious 
relation to "movements" is in just so far 
a mistaken and artificial mechanism, not cre- 
ative or alive at all. My poetry has never 
been written with the deliberate idea of ex- 
pressing this or that ; it has been written be- 
cause it was there in my mind to write, with- 
out any idea of being "among those present." 
But looking at it as a body of work, now 
that it is something done and printed, it 
seems to me that I have unknowingly taken 
for my share of the day's self-expression the 
things women are thinking and feeling — the 
things that many of them are not yet able to 
say. I am not the only one who is doing 
this. I only mean that this is what I seem 
to myself to be doing. As to my prose, I 
don't think I can say what relation that has 
to present day literary movements, because 
as yet I have tried to do little more than be 
a story-teller in the bazaar — to relate ro- 



THE EMPIRICISTS 93 

mances which should be sane and light- 
hearted, and which would make people gayer, 
perhaps, and perhaps a little comforted 
about the gray spots in the world, for read- 
ing them. 

I don't believe I am capable of a criticism 
of "contemporary literature as a whole" any 
more than I have done. It's going to be a 
big thing, I believe, but, like America itself, 
it is as yet chaotic, a grand, but unwelded 
thing. It isn't a whole so far. But I know 
it will be. 



THE ROMANTICISTS 



II 

THE ROMANTICISTS 

The essence of romanticism is a revolt 
against convention; in art every romantic 
movement has manifested itself in a deter- 
mination to extend the domain of experience 
and likewise to transcend the traditional 
forms of expression. The romantic quality 
of any professedly romantic work of art, 
therefore, lies either in a content which is 
strangely new or in an unwonted medium of 
expression, or both; any or all of which is 
intended to produce the superb shock of the 
unexpected, and evoke an emotional reaction 
whose quality has either been completely for- 
gotten, or else previously undiscovered. By 
pushing the definition to its logical conclu- 
sion we should learn that the quality of ro- 
mance lies, not in the work of art at all, but 
97 



98 THE L YOUNG IDEA 

in the emotion it arouses. In so far as it 
does not produce this distinctive quality of 
emotion it fails in being romantic. 

I shall be reproached, I fear, for terming 
the representatives of Imagism and of Spec- 
trism Romanticists. On the one hand, Miss 
Knish assures us that the doctrines of the 
Spectric school, of which her collaborator, 
Mr. Morgan, is the founder, are a fresh in- 
terpretation of classic gospels. On the other 
hand, we have been assured that the reforms 
which the Imagists are trying to work in our 
poetry have as their object principles which 
"are the essentials of all great poetry." But 
to be essentially romantic, a work of art need 
discover to us no new methods and no new 
idiom. If through old methods long for- 
gotten and an old idiom it tricks our emo- 
tions into responding to a new experience, it 
has accomplished an essentially romantic re- 
sult. So that, whether the principles of 
Imagism and of Spectrism are new or not, 
we are privileged to call the poetry in which 
they have found expression romantic art, if 



THE ROMANTICISTS 99 

for no other reason than that it has, judging 
by its reception, produced an emotional re- 
action of romantic quality in its readers. 
But there is a further reason that we can 
urge in justification, and that is that these 
two schools are preoccupied chiefly with pro- 
mulgating a new technique. Imagism and 
Spectrism are admittedly programmes of re- 
volt in the field of expression. 

The singular fact in the existence of these 
two schools is that their fundamental objects 
are directly antithetical. Imagists proclaim 
their faith in a rendering of an exact picture 
in an idiom which combines the character- 
istics of suggestion, vividness, concentration, 
and externality, in either of two forms, free 
verse or polyphonic prose. The Spectrists 
have as their objects the diffraction of emo- 
tion, and the conveying of after-images and 
overtones; moreover, they employ both the 
traditional poetic forms and free verse. The 
Spectrists thus seem, in a measure, to be 
chiefly interested in blurring and encircling 
with a haze of symbols the image which the 



100 THE X.OUNG IDEA 

Imagists, in their poems, are anxious to con- 
vey with photographic precision. 

This is not the place to further elucidate 
the theories of these two schools of writers. 
Readers who wish for more light are re- 
ferred to the preface to "Some Imagist 
Poets," and to Miss Amy Lowell's article, 
"A Consideration of Modern Poetry" in The 
North American Review for January, 1917, 
and to the preface to "Spectra" by Miss 
Knish and Mr. Morgan. It is interesting to 
note, however, that the poetry of both these 
schools emphasizes, each in its own way, a 
point touched upon in the contribution of 
Miss Harriet Munroe, the contrast between 
man's littleness and the greatness of the uni- 
verse and the fantastic and ironic self-im- 
portance of man in his relation to the uni- 
verse. 

Mr. John Gould Fletcher belongs, with 
Miss Amy Lowell, to the Imagists, whose 
program was first enunciated in 1913. His 
two volumes of verse, "Irradiations. Sand 



THE ROMANTICISTS 101 

and Spray," and "Goblins and Pagodas/' 
have given to the public his theory of the art 
of poetry and the product of its practice. He 
has been concerned chiefly with experiments 
in new forms. But what he has to say, in the 
following essay, of the content and form of 
contemporary poetry, brings additional 
light to bear upon the changes which he, in 
common with the other Imagists, are striving 
to bring about in our writing. 

There can be no doubt that at present 
there is a striving and a stirring in American 
Literature, on a scale never before witnessed. 
Hitherto the progress of American Liter- 
ature has been a question of individuals 
rather than of groups. The effect of the Civil 
War was to unify the country politically, 
but to decentralize it intellectually. When 
the Civil War came, a small group of men 
in New England controlled America's lit- 
erary destiny. The sixty years that have 
passed since then have been years of break- 



102 THE YOUNG IDEA 

up and transition, and the figures that have 
dominated those years — Henry James, Mark 
Twain, Bret Harte — have been isolated ex- 
amples of genius rather than products of any 
intense feeling for literature on the part of 
large bodies of their fellow-countrymen. It 
is noteworthy that all three of these men 
spent large portions of their lives in Europe, 
as if driven by inner necessity to seek a more 
favorable atmosphere for production and 
discussion of literature than America offered. 
Only Whitman remained, and Whitman 
waited his life long for the appreciation that 
never came from his country. 

At present all this is changed. America 
is demanding a national literature, and al- 
though this aspiration is not likely to be sat- 
isfied for some years yet, nevertheless steps 
are being taken to meet it. The War has 
had the effect of making Americans realize 
that they are something essentially different, 
in spite of the accident of a similar language, 
from the English ; and in spite of the accident 
of immigration, from the European stocks. 



THE ROMANTICISTS 103 

America is now engaged in the process of 
discovering itself. The process is not yet 
completed, nor has it gone on long enough 
to enable us with any confidence to predict 
what the future America may produce. We 
can only say that the battle for a new Amer- 
ica is being fought out most fiercely, in the 
field of poetry. Poetry, which may be de- 
fined as the art of the rhythmical expression 
of the emotions, has, from its very essence, 
attracted so far the most fanatical of those 
who wish to renew American Literature. At 
the same time, it is more difficult to predict 
what the future course of American poetry 
may be than that of any other form of lit- 
erary activity, for two reasons: First, be- 
cause there is not yet a large body of per- 
sons who constantly read new poetry; sec- 
ond, because the great majority of American 
editors and critics who deal with poetry have 
no other standards to guide them than the 
remote traditions of their school days, when 
they were trained to assimilate that which, 
whatever its place of origin, was strictly in 



104 THE YOUNG IDEA 

line with English standards of writing. 
Now there is only one thing which may be 
definitely predicted of American poetry, and 
that is, whatever it may become in the future, 
it can no longer follow English standards. 
Long ago Poe realized this fact, and strove 
to break loose from the ideals of the English 
Reviews, and to combat the influence of the 
small New England group, who, thanks to 
their long settlement in the country, and uni- 
versity training and sea-going traditions, re- 
mained true to English guidance. Later on 
Whitman devoted his life to the same cause 
of an autochthonous literature. Meanwhile, 
England and Europe in general steadfastly 
refused to recognize any American literature 
which was not impregnated with this native 
taint and aim. This process has been accen- 
tuated since the outbreak of the War. The 
outstanding results of the European cata- 
clysm have been, politically and intellectu- 
ally, to set apart from the influence of the 
seaboard, the Central United States, from 
the Alleghanies to the Rockies, and from the 



THE ROMANTICISTS 105 

Canadian border to the Gulf, and to pro- 
claim their predominance. This block of 
central and valley States now controls Amer- 
ica; it is setting its face southward and west- 
ward ; and all other American forces, such as 
the small New England group, are being 
drawn into its current. 

Athwart and throughout this central ten- 
dency there runs yet a mixture of emotional 
and intellectual factors confusing the issue. 
There is first of all the factor of racial hered- 
ity, and of its assimilation to American con- 
ditions. This is incalculable. Secondly and 
more calculable as to outcome, are the factors 
of the struggle between vers libre and 
rhymed metre, of realism versus personal 
fantasy, of poetry based upon external phe- 
nomena or internal symbolism. Let us ex- 
amine each one in turn. 

The battle for vers libre stands as good as 
won, in my opinion. America has something 
new and different to express, and a new ex- 
pression cannot be clothed in a guise of an 
old form, any more than new wine can be 



106 THE YOUNG IDEA 

put into new bottles. We must create our 
poetics for ourselves. The mere fact that 
we choose for the purposes of our writing 
a language very nearly similar to the Eng- 
lish tongue, means nothing, any more than 
the New Testament, by being written in 
Greek, holds parentage with Homer and 
Euripides. We must content ourselves with 
not trying to imitate English models, which 
were created for a different atmosphere and 
public than our own, and set ourselves reso- 
lutely to the task of creating new ones. 
Nevertheless, it is important to note that vers 
libres are as easy to write as rhymed dog- 
gerel, and that there is no hope for any form 
which will not develop. In its primitive 
shape, as in the works of Whitman, vers 
Wore is simply natural rhythm — the rhythm 
of the sea, the river, the wind blowing over a 
lake or the boughs rocking in the wind. We 
must go further than this. We must build 
up these rhythms into stanzas or blocks of 
rhythm. We must admit rhyme, allitera- 
tion, assonance, as occasional but valuable 



THE ROMANTICISTS 107 

adjuncts. We must take up the problem of 
the development of our themes, and of our 
style. 

The struggle between realism and per- 
sonal fantasy has not yet been settled. The 
realists such as Frost or Masters, have given 
us broadly shaped works, but no intensely 
vividly memorable lines. The followers of 
individual fantasy, such as the Imagists, to 
which I belong, the New York "Others" 
group, the recently-appearing Spectrists, 
have given vividly memorable lines and short 
poems, but nothing of the depth and human 
breadth which the Realists display. It is 
noteworthy that these Fantaisists (if such I 
may call them), have shown a distinct ten- 
dency to group themselves into schools about 
certain centres, whereas the Realists are 
mostly separate phenomena. 

It is also noteworthy that diverse poets as, 
for example, Vachel Lindsay and Conrad 
Aiken, seem to be unable to fit into either 
group, but are striving for a blend of Real- 
ism and Fantasy — a poetry which demands 



108 THE YOUNG IDEA 

at once the most precise observation and the 
most complete use and control of such ob- 
servation to imaginative ends. 

As regards the third great question, that 
of external application versus internal sym- 
bolism, I must admit that the former is at 
present triumphant, although my own sym- 
pathies go mostly with the latter. It seems 
to me that as the imagination of the poet 
exercises itself more and more freely, there 
must come a time when he realizes that the 
aim of all this can be nothing more or less 
than the attempt to reconcile material phe- 
nomena with internal ideas and feelings — 
whether these be his own or those of other 
people. And this attempt can only express 
itself by employing the external world as 
more or less definite symbolical material. In 
this respect I must disagree with the "exter- 
nalism" of so brilliant a poet as Miss Amy 
Lowell, whose work seems to me, neverthe- 
less, the culmination of her own theory. 

Having thus briefly examined the state of 1 
poetry today in America, let me conclude 



THE ROMANTICISTS 109 

with a word of hope for the future. 

America will only attain to her fullest lit- 
erary development if she can be made to re- 
alize that achievement and theory must go 
hand in hand. We must be prepared to build 
up anew, on a new basis, and therefore we 
must not seek to compare ourselves to for- 
eign models, nor to imitate these in any way, 
but only to use them, in whatever language 
written, as objects of study. We must free 
ourselves of any dogmatic adherence to for- 
eign literatures, whether these be English, 
French, German or Russian — but be pre- 
pared to make use of any foreign idea that 
achieves our ends, in exactly the self-same 
spirit as the men who build the skyscrapers 
of New York employ the elements of for- 
eign architectural styles, for a different pur- 
pose. 

Above all, we must create intelligible the- 
ories of Art to match our practice, and the 
discussion and revision of these theories must 
proceed constantly. It is ridiculous for any 
one to suppose that poetry or any other Art 



110 THE YOUNG IDEA 

can progress without criticism, or that in 
the Elizabethan, or any other age, literature 
sprang spontaneously from the soil. We 
know that this was not the case. The theory 
and practice of English Poetry have ever 
gone hand in hand since the generation im- 
mediately preceding the great Elizabethans 
— a generation whose ardent discussion of 
the merits of rhymed as against classical and 
rhymeless metres closely resembles the 
battle being waged about vers libre to-day. 
And any opportunity to enlarge the bounds 
of discussion by defending whatever is novel 
in one's own practice, should therefore be 
welcomed by every serious American poet. 

Miss Amy Lowell is so well-known as the 
apologist of the Imagist movement in this 
country that her paper requires no preface. 
Her most recent books of verse are "A 
Dome of Many-Colored Glass," "Sword 
Blades and Poppy Seed," and "Men, 
Women and Ghosts," in addition to which 
she has published a volume of criticism, "Six 
French Poets," 



THE ROMANTICISTS 111 

( 1 ) I think there is distinctly a new move- 
ment today, but I regard that movement as 
especially evident in poetry at the present 
moment. Prose is still too much under the 
domination of magazine editors to have 
broken away and started anything very new. 
Our prose writers are still inferior to those 
of England. Our poets, on the other hand, 
are, I think, inferior to none living today, 
either in England or in the European coun- 
tries. 

(2) It is a little difficult to say what are 
the ideals of a movement. (And in speaking 
of the new movement I shall confine myself 
strictly to poetry.) I should say that the 
ideal evidenced in all the better poetry to- 
day is toward a great naturalness and sim- 
plicity; a trend away frcm the sentimental 
and pretty-pretty, which for so long reigned 
in American verse. The poets today are 
seeking reality — the greater reality, which 
includes ideality ; they are seeking it through 
the simplicity and beauty of current speech ; 
and, with a greater faith in the universe, they 



112 THE YOUNG IDEA 

find poetry in many quarters where the older 
poets did not admit it to exist. The cur- 
rent discussion of forms shows a very super- 
ficial conception of the new poetry, forms 
being merely a means to an end. The new 
movement can be found, not only among the 
vers librists, but among those writers who 
habitually employ the older forms. 

(3) It is impossible to say which of the 
new currents of poetry seem to be import- 
ant. These currents are like the contribu- 
tary streams of a great river. They are all 
important to the development of the main 
flow. So long as they be authentic and sin- 
cere each has its place. 

(4) You ask me what relation my own 
work bears to this movement, which is a 
question very difficult for anyone to answer 
about oneself. My aim is for greater depth, 
beauty, sincerity, and vividness. To that 
end, I am interested in many methods of 
attaining it; but I insist that poetry must 
always be poetical, and I prefer that it 
should be dramatic as well. Poetry, to my 



THE ROMANTICISTS 113 

mind, is man's endeavor to express, not only 
his emotions, but the highest beauty he ap- 
prehends; and any method is permissible 
which conveys that emotion and that beauty 
to the reader. 

This does not, of course, mean that readers 
may not have to be taught a new idiom. A 
poet should always be ahead of his time, 
otherwise he is no true seer — in the old sense 
of the word, "to perceive." It is those poets 
who have been more misapprehended during 
the time of their writing who have meant 
most to succeeding generations. 

(5) As to my criticism of contemporary 
American literature — that is almost too large 
a subject to deal with in a letter. The great 
danger hitherto has been the large prices 
which popular magazines pay for the sort 
of thing that attracts their clients. As 
writers must live, there has come about a sort 
of facile writing, built very much upon one 
pattern, and which is sure of its audience. 
This has done an immense amount to injure 
American literature. But it is a natural and 



114 THE YOUNG IDEA 

healthy sign that the poets, possibly because 
they have no temptation, have been able to 
free themselves from this commercial influ- 
ence. As poetry is the most highly emotion- 
alized of all the forms of writing, it is also 
natural and proper that they should be the 
first to break away from a baneful influence. 
Doubtless the prose writers will follow their 
lead before long. The true poetical move- 
ment today must not be confused with the 
desire to shock and surprise in some modern 
verse. Where a few people are sincere and 
original, there will always be a crowd of 
imitators to follow them. Time alone can 
sift the chaff from the wheat. But that such 
imitators do exist is no proof that the more 
serious of the modern poets are not sincere. 

The latest of the movements for a wider 
technical freedom in poetry is that brought 
forward by the Spectrists, a school for which 
Miss Anne Knish and Mr. Emanuel Mor- 
gan stand as sponsors. Miss Knish defines 
its aim as a fresh interpretation of classic 



THE ROMANTICISTS 115 

gospels. She believes our present poetic re- 
nascence to be a derivation from a stale cur- 
rent. 

I do not know if I have a right to speak on 
this subject, for American poets will resent, 
perhaps, the criticism of one whose native 
tongue is the Russian, and who has written 
only one English book. Yet since you ask 
me, I will answer, with humility, as to poetry 
only. 

Your new movement in poetry seems to 
me too closely derived from a French move- 
ment that is already ancient history to Con- 
tinental Europe. Young people without 
genius slip into this stale current and have 
much fun; but many of their tragic poems 
are of humorous effect, I think, and when 
they would be funny I sometimes weep. It 
is like a piece of cheese left over at break- 
fast. So little is basically grounded on a 
theory of aesthetic that is of new import ; and 
these young people fear the classic aesthetic 
as they would poison. They need not; 



116 THE YOUNG IDEA 

though we seek new drinks to become 
drunken with, the doctrine of Aristoteles re- 
mains the staff of life, the bread. 

We who are of the Spectric School of 
poets have tried, contradicting no ancient 
truth, to give fresh interpretation to classic 
gospels. If our aesthetic dogma be sound, 
the other poets will before long become 
aware. But these are in American poetry- 
days only of beginning; and I think these 
people know nothing of European literary 
history who speak so much of "new, new, 
new!" 

Mr. Emanuel Morgan, collaborator with 
Miss Knish upon "Spectra," tells us that 
the essential quality of Spectric poetry is 
humor, and defines its basis in vision. 

Yes, there is a new, or, rather, renewed 
movement in poetry. Its ideals are life. It 
is born of the death of the immediate past. 
Its most important current, for the moment, 
seems to me to be the current of mirth, and 



THE ROMANTICISTS 117 

in that current much of our work belongs. 
We call ourselves a "School." But all we 
are doing, as I see it, is to combine and 
realize qualities which are appearing, now 
here, now there, among much modern poetry 
not professedly spectrist, viz. : catholicity of 
subject and metre, a quick registering of 
mental reflections by a sort of leapfrog 
metaphor, an exchange of intuitions; in 
short, by imagination or humor, a breaking 
through the mere pretty or ugly surface of 
things. 

In our own convenient terms, spectrism 
belongs to its time in that it intends the poem 
or spectrum, by means of laughter or other 
illumination, to send an enchanted X-ray 
through the skin to the lungs and liver and 
heart of life. 



THE IDEALISTS: 

THE RENASCENCE OF SPIRIT 
UALITY 



Ill 

THE IDEALISTS 

The four poets here grouped as Idealists 
could be more accurately described as spir- 
itualists, did not the word spiritualism con- 
vey a special connotation which does not in 
the least apply to the theories of these poets. 
The idea which each of them has expressed 
is that today we are experiencing a rena- 
scence of faith, that after an era in which 
spiritual experience was doubted and during 
which the soul was denied, the writers, as in- 
terpreters of the thought and the feeling of 
their time, have discovered, as the most im- 
portant thing in life, the soul of man and its 
relation to the absolute. 

They would claim that literature which 
does not take into account man's religious 
experience is superficial and false to life. 
121 



122 THE YOUNG IDEA 

Their point of view may briefly be described 
thus: Science, in its quest for a wholly 
truthful explanation of the world in which 
we live, has achieved only a partial explana- 
tion, since it is dependent upon rational 
proof in establishing the validity of its doc- 
trines. But beyond the truth which science 
has established, there lies another body of 
truth revealed to man intuitively in the ex- 
perience of faith. This body of truth may 
or may not in the future be susceptible of 
rational proof; at present we apprehend it 
only subjectively and intuitively in faith. 
And it is this experience of faith and its dis- 
covery of the ideal within the real which these 
four writers believe to be the most signifi- 
cant contribution of our life to-day, in its 
expression in literature. 

Plato believed that our joy in the dis- 
covery of beauty and truth in the world was 
founded upon an unconscious memory of the 
perfect truth and beauty seen by the soul 
in its heavenly chariot ride before birth. The 
fable of the heavenly chariot ride was his 



THE IDEALISTS 123 

poetic interpretation of the experience of 
faith. And these poets, in saying that the 
highest art is an expression of spiritual ex- 
perience, and that as such it moves us 
through our souls, are restating in a modern 
form the idealism of Plato. 

Mr. William Rose Benet's gospel is one of 
greater individualism, as against the ten- 
dency toward a democratization of poetry. 
But his central thought is of the essential 
concern of poetry with the things of the 
spirit. 

Yes, I think a new movement in American 
literature is making itself felt. It was first 
manifested in the field of poetry. The re- 
cent revival of free verse and the introduc- 
tion of some new cults, such as Imagism, 
have had, on the whole, an invigorating influ- 
ence. The point is not that the things now 
being done in verse are new, but that they 
have shaken awake the faculties of poets and 
critics (widely apart as are some of these in 



124 THE YOUNG IDEA 

their opinions). How much of the flood of 
contemporary experimentation will remain 
when the inevitable alternating ebb sets in 
is beyond anybody to say very comprehen- 
sively. So much for poetry. American fic- 
tion is now working toward greater sincerity 
than in past years, I think, having already 
attained a very high average of technical 
merit. The "manner" has been mastered — 
the "matter" will be more vital in most 
novels and short stories from now on. At 
least, such is my particular faith. The ro- 
mantic school both in prose and poetry is out 
of fashion at present. I suppose my own 
work falls more into the romantic category 
than into the realistic, though, as far as my 
reading goes, I enjoy Dostoievsky and Ed- 
gar Lee Masters immensely. Poetry, in my 
opinion, cannot escape a certain touch of 
mysticism. Prose, if desired, can dispense 
with this element entirely. But the most 
realistic poets — and take Masters again, for 
an example (as he is, just at present, the 
cynosure of all eyes) — the most realistic of 



THE IDEALISTS 125 

poets, as Masters, cannot wholly escape his 
particular mysticism, cannot surrender him- 
self entirely to a materialistic or even a ra- 
tionalistic conception of the universe. This 
has nothing to do with his opinions upon or- 
ganized society or anything else — it is most 
often involuntary, but nevertheless creeps 
into and most beautifully permeates his 
graver poems. Prose discussion can often 
win through a climax of glib denial, that con- 
vinces temporarily. I feel that real poetry 
cannot — for our deepest thoughts cannot 
(by the nature of the animal!) deny, though 
they may be saturated with doubt. Those 
most truly poets are necessarily mystics to 
a certain extent — whether they like it or 
not. They do not arrive at their conclusions 
by the straight streets of logic, but by the 
wandering roads of emotion, in spite of 
themselves often. For one of the necessities 
to their being artists is, after all, to be able 
to feel why a thing is right or wrong. One 
could reason it out all day and, without this 
feeling, which engenders the creative emo- 



126 THE YOUNG IDEA 

tion, could have no nucleus in one's decisions 
for any work of art. Dealing with a me- 
dium, such as poetry, which depends mainly 
upon its emotion for its greatness, the ra- 
tionalist must be comparatively sterile 
unless his "reason" seethes itself into "pas- 
sion," in which case the mystical quality 
enters again and "rationalism" becomes a 
misnomer. 

Therefore, I do not feel that our glib di- 
visions of poets into romantic and realistic 
groups or clans is any very great matter. 

I dislike cliques, schools, sects, and 
"movements" in poetry. There is usually 
one leader to each, who produces something. 
The rest strive to make themselves like the 
leader and come off as badly as Atherton in 
"Atherton's Gambit," in Edwin Arlington 
Robinson's poem. There is always the 
"brains" of the "movement." In poetry the 
"movement" itself has never mattered, it has 
been the individual. It always will be. You 
cannot any more democratize poetry than 
vou can democratize a humming-bird — ex- 



THE IDEALISTS 127 

cept in this sense, that more people educate 
their finer faculties, or get them educated, 
as time goes on, and so come to look into the 
books that were always under their noses. 
Say to a poet that he must write about the 
laboring-man, the brothel, the tenement, the 
slaughter-house, — and you would have him 
immediately writing of all the fairy people 
and places and all the mythological rigama- 
roles in the world — and serve you right! 
But say to a poet that he must play safely 
inside the garden palings and you'll have 
him running down Queer Street in his night- 
shirt, waving a petroleum torch. Such are 
poets — in other words, they are strong indi- 
vidualists, and when they try to herd to- 
gether the sight is just too pitiful for any- 
thing! 

In closing I wish to say that I am not a 
Whitmanite. Whitman was a great writer, 
but from the present babble of all the young 
in America one would think that Whitman 
was the only man who had ever written 
poetry in America. Some of the adulation 



128 THE YOUNG IDEA 

is simply sickening. I wish some of our 
modern poets would stop quoting what 
Whitman thought about art and life and 
begin to produce art and life as they see it. 
This idea of "handing on the torch" is all 
very fine — but I have a lot more respect for 
a man who goes out to the pinewood and 
yanks off and lights his own. I should say 
to the modern American poet in general, — 
break away, break away, — get out and exer- 
cise your own soul, refuse to be smothered 
to death in a clique, a group, a theory. Keep 
the law of the outlier! It is well that you 
should have to make yourself more or less 
useful to the community, but keep your work 
your own. Play it lone-handed, possibly 
wrong-headed, — but keep your work free, 
individual, more than a thing of barter, — 
quite outside and unafraid of styles or fash- 
ions or popular applause or the lack of it. 
The poet has usually saved his soul in that 
way alone. 

Mr. Joyce Kilmer is known as a poet, 



THE IDEALISTS 129 

critic and essayist. And one of the distinc- 
tive qualities of his writings is its discovery 
of the beauty and the spirituality of common 
life. And he finds a spiritual awakening to 
be the most important current in contempor- 
ary poetry. 

I am not an enthusiastic student of liter- 
ary movements, believing that literature ex- 
ists independent of schools and cults and 
coteries, and for the most part uninfluenced 
by them. But I believe that a certain change 
is coming over the philosophies and attitudes 
toward life of those who make our poems 
and stories, and perhaps an attempt to de- 
scribe this change will be considered an an- 
swer to your question. 

The literature of America, like the litera- 
ture of all the rest of the world, is progress- 
ing away from materialism toward idealism. 
Our writers are becoming aware of the fact 
that the subject of the greatest literature 
must be the soul of man, which is the most 
interesting thing in the world. The day of 



130 THE YOUNG IDEA 

pessimism and atheism and pseudopaganism 
in literature is past. A poet who today de- 
voted his energies to attacking Christianity, 
as Swinburne did, would be unable to find 
a publisher. Paganism is as dead as ping- 
pong or as a bit of the slang of nineteen hun- 
dred and six. 

Of course, there are a few writers who are 
archaic and reactionary. Mr. Theodore 
Dreiser is a reactionary clinging, as he does, 
to methods that were considered startling in 
Zola's day. But Mr. Dreiser's books are 
read only by people who are paid for the task 
by the Society for the Suppression of Vice. 
Miss Amy Lowell is a reactionary, because 
she is still writing and talking about Ima- 
gism — a fad popular among a few of the 
younger London poets back in nineteen thir- 
teen. But no one reads Miss Lowell's writ- 
ings — I have too much respect for her good 
taste to believe that she herself reads them. 
And these two writers are living anachro- 
nisms, not actually related to the literature 
of our day. 



THE IDEALISTS 131 

In the United States, we have so far es- 
caped the stern discipline of the War, but 
our writers seem, nevertheless, to have 
learned their lesson from it. They have seen 
the handwriting on the wall of the world. 
When Rupert Brooke thanked God for the 
cleansing red flood of battle, when he re- 
joiced in the re-birth of honor and courage 
and faith and for the passing of "half -men 
and their dirty songs and dreary, and all the 
little emptiness of love," I think that he 
spoke for all the writers of the world — for 
those of the United States as well as for 
those of Europe. The late Emile Verhseren 
exemplified the same renascence of idealism 
when he wrote his noble poem on the shell- 
ing of Rheims Cathedral. He lamented the 
desecration of the cathedral not because it 
was a magnificent piece of architecture but 
because it was a holy place. This feeling in 
the heart of a man who for years had been 
counted among the enemies of religion was 
greatly significant. It was not until the 
churches were actually under fire that the 



132 THE YOUNG IDEA 

"intellectuals" of Europe knew their value. 
And the writers of America are getting this 
lesson at second hand. 

Of course our greatest living writers have 
always been idealists — the Germans did not 
need to cross Belgian soil to discover to them 
their own souls. In the work of Anna 
Hempstead Branch, Edith Thomas, Louise 
Imogen Guiney and our other poets of au- 
thentic calling, there has always been a 
radiant idealism, a joyous recognition of life 
transcending life. Impressionistic critics 
call E. A. Robinson a pessimist, but the 
careful student of his poetry knows that it 
consists merely of a series of intensely inter- 
esting and beautifully phrased questions, all 
having the same answer, that answer being 
God. Those of our prose writers who have 
achieved most success — who have been most 
widely read and are most likely to continue 
to be read, are idealists. Imagine what 
worse-than-Zola O. Henry would have writ- 
ten, could he, like Zola, have seen only flesh 
and blood and brains ! But he was a student 



THE IDEALISTS 133 

of the souls of men and women, and, there- 
fore, he will be read by generations who 
never will hear the names of Artzibasheff's 
American imitators. 

And since nineteen fourteen there has been 
noticeable in the literature produced in this 
country, especially in the poetry, a sort of 
spiritual frankness that is an encouraging 
sign. I think that the publication of Mar- 
jorie Pickthall's "Mary Shepherdess," in 
Scribner's for Christmas nineteen fifteen, of 
Margaret Widdemer's "The Old Road to 
Paradise," in one of Mr. Hearst's most 
widely circulated magazines, and perhaps of 
the long poem by Ridgeley Torrence in 
Scribner's for December, nineteen sixteen, 
are startling signs of the times. Much water 
— much blood-stained water has flowed 
under the bridge since Professor Henry 
Augustin Beers wrote that nine days' won- 
der, "The Dying Pantheist," or whatever it 
was called. No magazine of reputation 
would print that poem today. 

I do not think that writers lead the 



134 THE YOUNG IDEA 

thought of their time, I think that they re- 
flect and interpret it. The world today is 
forgetting all its fads and isms and pictur- 
esque heresies and returning to its primitive 
faith. Francis Thompson predicted this, 
years ago in his strange and beautiful poem 
"Lilium Regis." Our writers — except those 
who willfully separate themselves from the 
life around them — are recording and ex- 
plaining and celebrating this return which is 
a most glorious advance. 

Miss Josephine Preston Peabody is cath- 
olic in allowing the poet all freedoms. She 
finds the most significant tendency of mod- 
ern poetry in its rediscovery of the spirit 
through suffering. 

1. Is there a new movement in poetry 
today in this country? 

No. I should say there is an eddy. It is 
related to movement, or progress, as a side- 
eddy is related to the main current of a river. 
That is to say : To my mind all real progress 



THE IDEALISTS 135 

in art or life means a wider and intenser con- 
sciousness. For that, two things are indis- 
pensable: analysis and synthesis. There is 
a new style (not movement) in poetry which 
represents the analytic element, with its joy 
in the discovery or re-discovery of certain 
tools of poetic expression, not apparently 
ready to its mind or hand, before. The syn- 
thetic impulse which w r ould relate this new 
impulse to the past (and which will, in timey 
seems to be lacking at present to most of the 
prophets of the New Style. 

I call this an eddy, because it is incident 
to the natural growth and onwardness of 
poetry; also because I think its chief use is 
Disturbance ; Disturbance as a stimulus. In 
other words, the animated contention over all 
the terms of poetry which of late has filled 
so much space in the magazines, has also 
served to set many persons (disinterested 
and uninterested) questioning poetry, what 
the thing may be; even as, while the world 
endures, any indication of a street-fight will 
draw a crowd. 



136 THE L YOUNG IDEA 

2. What are its ideals? 

Its ideals, I should say, as far as ideals are 
shareable among any company of human be- 
ings, are precisely the ideals that have moved 
men to expression since time began: viz., 
the sense of Life ; the passion to express Life, 
as it is or as it feels ; the deep disinclination 
to take Life at hearsay; and an abounding 
enthusiasm for the newest tools that suits 
the hand of the craftsman. 

The differences from this generality must 
be set forth by the exponents of "New 
Style." My own and only source of dis- 
agreement with prophets of this particular 
freedom, is my conviction that they are not 
free enough ; and that they will allow no man 
freedoms of his own. 

3. What relation does it bear to the imme- 

diate past?, 

The belief that it is a revolution. As a 
matter of fact, it would seem to be a very 



THE IDEALISTS 137 

natural activity, having its freshest roots in 
the rousing challenge of Walt Whitman, 
enriched and stimulated of late, by the 
craftsmanship, and the joy in their secret, 
of several striking French artists and their 
able fellows, here and in England. 

4. Which of many currents seem to you 
the most important? 

I think there are not many currents. 
There are many individuals; there are even 
more individualists. Setting aside all minor 
confusions of method and manner, the gen- 
eral movement of poetry still divides, as art 
has always done (where there is division) — 
and Man has always done, when he has felt 
as a house divided against itself, — into body 
and soul. Normally or synthesized, the Man 
is one. But these eddies of consciousness 
make twain of him very naturally ; and in our 
own country at present, the two currents of 
artistic ideal express this temporary parting. 
One takes account of Man chiefly through 
his soul, — as we still find it useful to call 



138 THE L YOUNG IDEA 

the Live-Thing- Within, that makes him 
walk and see. The other deals with the ex- 
ternals, the passing chances, the things 
walked by, the things seen; taking no ac- 
count or rather, trying not to take account 
of that Live-Thing- Within, the seer. 

Naturally, the Live-Thing- Within seems 
to me the thing which gives significance as 
well as sight to the man; to his limner, and 
to the tools chosen by that fellow-workman 
to carry out his design. 

Even the most contentious artists are apt 
to agree that Art interprets Life. They 
disagree perpetually as to what Life may be ; 
and as to the variety and fitness of one an- 
other's tools. 

But, inasmuch as present-day life is dis- 
covering to Europe, through suffering, the 
soul it had come to doubt, I think the most 
significant Art of today is the art that bears 
witness to this suffering, this discovery, this 
painful birth of a triumphing Spirit. 

5. What relation does your own work bear 
to this new movement? 



THE IDEALISTS 139 

A merely human relation : inasmuch as all 
sincere and unified work is a spontaneous 
growth of one's own spirit, regardless of 
what others are doing or are like to do. Ar- 
tistic beliefs are as different in color as re- 
ligions; and there are as many religions as 
there are individuals. 

I am for all freedoms; even other peo- 
ple's. I am also for all manner of symme- 
tries, rhythms, and musics (overflowing with 
delight for me) that might strike other minds 
as bonds for them. A new method seems 
to me preposterous only (but always) when 
it proposes to "displace" some heritage of 
beauty, that has survived by virtue of beauty, 
from the indifferent past. The past, be it 
noted, is not with us to serve as curator of 
that heritage, so often referred to by con- 
temporary writers as an archaeological dis- 
play. As if a water-lily must needs displace 
the rose. 

My working faith Is this: To the work- 
man, his choice of tools. To the reader, his 
own delights. 



140 THE YOUNG IDEA 

6. What is your criticism of present litera- 
ture? 

That is, — when it is voice without spirit? 

Too little heart for Real Life, in spite of 
the flourish of trumpets. Too little courage 
to face the mysteries of the dark, with so few 
earnings in its pocket. — No real fortitude; 
or little. Struggle it can bear, and welcome ; 
but not silence or solitude. It can attack: 
it cannot face a siege. It is rich in bragging 
body. It is feeble of vision. 

I might sum up all, with a flouting word 
of little-sister brevity: — "Talk less. — Sing 
more." 

Mr. Ridgely Torrence likewise finds us to 
be in a period of spiritual regeneration. 
And he points out that unless vision con- 
trols the poet, his work is worthless. 

Surely there can be but one ideal and that 
must be held by each individual writer, 
namely: to express the truth that is in him 
or her. 



THE IDEALISTS 141 

A time of visions and renewed faith is be- 
ginning faintly to dawn and this is not un- 
rumoured among Americans. 

If there are many "currents" in this 
"movement," I am not concerned with which 
is the most important, I am only interested 
in what a writer has to say. If he has, in the 
highest sense, something to say, he will not 
reveal it until it has been wholly fused in the 
fires of his heart and imagination and then 
it will be expressed in its inevitable and per- 
fect form. One might pursue this, but a sin- 
gle example will serve: Emerson knew but 
one or two tunes, and those doggerel ones, 
but by virtue.of his burning secret his penny 
pipes gave forth a glorious poetry, the dis- 
tilled essence of song. 



THE PESSIMISTS 



IV 

THE PESSIMISTS 

Pessimism, we are told by the Standard 
Dictionary, is a disposition to take a gloomy 
view of affairs. No other word so closely 
approximates the attitude taken by these 
four writers toward our contemporary liter- 
ature. One tells us that today we are upon 
the eve of birth, and implies that the con- 
temporary movement in literature is the first 
evidence of a future parturition, but that, of 
itself, it has accomplished nothing. Another 
tells us that there is nothing to distinguish 
American literature from English literature. 
And both of the remaining two see no evi- 
dence of any significant movement in the 
writing that is being done today. 

Mr. Benjamin DeCasseres explains his 
145 



146 THE YOUNG IDEA 

own work. And he tells us what is wrong 
with our literature. 

There is undoubtedly a new movement 
in our literature today. We are on the 
eve of Birth. There are no ideals that 
I can perceive. It is wildly spontaneous, 
individualistic and anarchic. Its relation 
to the immediate past will, I think, be 
a complete demolition of the stupidities 
and puritanism that have ossified us and 
petrified us. Its watchword will be Liberty. 
My own work is destructive and bears no re- 
lation to the past American literature. As 
I am an imaginative ironist and a mystical 
pessimist, my roots are in the Latin civiliza- 
tion of Europe, though I count among my 
forebears Poe and Walt Whitman. 

Imagination, irony and the superb amoral- 
ism of Greece — that is what my work stands 
for, and it is that that I hope to see dominate 
the Coming Age in this country. The nine 
vital books (poetry, essay, satire, short stor- 
ies, epigrams, philosophical paragraphs and 



THE PESSIMISTS 147 

confessions) which I have written, and which 
no publisher as yet will publish, are, because 
of their rejection, an indictment against the 
enormous stupidity of the status quo here in 
America. My own work is epochal in Amer- 
ican literature; but I cannot compete with 
the hopeless sissification of our college-rid- 
den publishing houses and magazines. 

Today the symbol of American literature 
should be a teething ring ; tomorrow I hope it 
will be two eagles ridden by Lucifer and 
Aphrodite. 

Mr. Floyd Dell, one of the editors of 
The Masses, claims that we have no truly 
national literature. 

(1) "Our literature" — if you mean by 
that American literature, there isn't any 
such thing as distinguished from English 
literature. In the United States, the maga- 
zine has a more powerful and more dis- 
astrous influence than in England, where 
fiction is still written for readers of 



148 THE YOUNG IDEA 

books. But there are signs that Amer- 
ican fiction is bursting its magazine bounds. 
The most significant influence upon Ameri- 
can writing seems to be the example of H. G. 
Wells and the half dozen other Englishmen 
who are trying to draw true pictures of life. 
(2) The ideal of the newer kind of writers 
in this country is to depict America as they 
see it — a sufficiently good ideal, and one 
that, fortunately, the magazines are pretty 
much in sympathy with. (3) "The imme- 
diate past," I take it, is the historical novel. 
It was, I suppose, Frank Norris who ushered 
in the new era. Our relation to the historical 
novel past consists in our having grown up. 
But why try to create "periods"? There 
have nearly always been people in the United 
States who tried to tell the truth about what 
they saw. (4) If there must be "currents," 
let us say there is a current setting toward 
"style" and another current setting toward 
"journalism." I am in sympathy with the 
latter. ( 6 ) American fiction seems to me in 
the main too morally provincial. 



THE PESSIMISTS 149 

Mr. Donald Marquis is a poet who is also 
a novelist and satirist. His own modest ap- 
praisal of his work does not do it justice. 
His "Cruise of the Jasper B.," and espe- 
cially his "Hermione," a collection of satiric 
essays upon the contemporary mind, are de- 
lightful contributions to our recent writing. 
His column, "The Sun Dial," in the New 
York Evening Sun,, offers an asylum to 
many young poets, and is an excellent ex- 
ample of the new literary current in Ameri- 
can journalism. 

(1) There are many experiments, fads, 
imitations of European authors, minor inno- 
vations, but I see nothing of sufficient bulk 
or significance to deserve being called the 
new movement; or in the sense that the Im- 
pressionist painters inaugurated a new move^ 
ment, or in the sense that Wagner's music 
was new movement. 

This also disposes of questions 2, 3 and 4. 

(5) My own work doesn't amount to a 
tinker's dam in relation to anything import- 



150 THE YOUNG IDEA 

ant. I'm only getting started, and have a 
disinclination towards kidding myself. 

(6) Contemporary American literature 
is all right . . . what there is of it. If I 
had a sure recipe for making more of it, I 
wouldn't tell anybody ; I'd use the recipe in 
my business. But there are no recipes, and 
can be none. There are only men who have 
power, and men who lack power. The men 
who lack power cluster around the men who 
have power . . . and that is all a movement 
is. 

Mr. John Curtis Underwood is a poet and 
critic. He bases his adverse criticism of our 
contemporary literature upon certain condi- 
tioning factors in our national life which he 
believes to be responsible for making our 
psychology what it is. 

In "The Research Magnificent," H. G. 
Wells has said something about an imagi- 
nary effort to organize the best thought of 
the world through the mediums of special- 



THE PESSIMISTS 151 

ized effort and printing house propaganda. 
In an earlier novel he has laid stress on an 
insistent need for "resonators," people of 
normal intelligence and culture capable in 
one way or another of receiving and trans- 
mitting human progress in terms of art and 
science and socialized and efficient good will. 
During the last three or four years, progress 
in these directions in North America, taken 
as a whole, seems to me backward rather than 
forward. 

Any trend of thought and feeling as vast 
in its superficial extent, as barren in its posi- 
tive results, so far, cannot be judged, con- 
demned or inspired independently of the en- 
vironment that produces it and which it re- 
flects, however trivially and commercially. 
It cannot be judged constructively without 
some taking of contributing testimony from 
its sister arts of the drama, the moving pic- 
ture and American book and magazine illus- 
tration, popularly patronized and exploited 
from Broadway to Los Angeles. It cannot 
continue to be written and printed (not even 



152 THE YOUNG IDEA 

by its rarest and strongest; its finest and 
most efficient producers and distributors) 
free from the inevitable reaction upon it of 
the manners and customs, the commercial 
and civic immorality, the mean average in- 
telligence and the culture rudimentary or 
otherwise of the millions who read, as well 
as the hundreds or the thousands who write 
or who edit. It cannot continue to represent 
and misrepresent the incompatible national, 
pacificists and socialistic ideals variously in- 
dulged in by 100,000,000 people loosely 
grouped together by conventional legal and 
police protection without abandoning, sooner 
or later, one very traditional and American 
attitude of academic neutrality toward the 
problems of the masses and the classes in 
America (which very definitely includes 
Mexico today) and the rest of the world on 
the other side of the Atlantic and Pacific 
Oceans. 

For the vast majority of the American 
public who indirectly produce and modify 
American journalism and literature today as 



THE PESSIMISTS 153 

no publisher's following or look to local co- 
terie ever has done or will do, the literary 
center of America continues to be the hotel, 
railroad station and street corner newsstand, 
quite as definitely and extravagantly as it 
did more than three years ago when the fol- 
lowing paragraphs of the preface to my Lit- 
erature and Insurgency were written. 

Criticism of literature per se is a lost art 
in America today. Tomorrow or the day af- 
ter it will come back as an exact science and 
part of a constructive insurgent revolt 
against machine-made and slipshod condi- 
tions in literature and in the life that litera- 
ture interprets. 

Any American criticism that is fit to sur- 
vive or worthy of the name, must recognize 
that authors, editors, publishers, malefactors 
of great and lesser circulation and all their 
works, are to be classed essentially as prod- 
ucts of environment and forces that react on 
the same, and so dealt with. 

The fact that muck-raking has been made 
profitable and that our muck-raking maga- 



154 THE YOUNG IDEA 

zines have proved their fitness to survive and 
to adapt themselves to American needs and 
ideals of today, represents the most import- 
ant economic advance of the last fifty years. 

Sooner or later in the present campaign 
of education, in the new reorganization and 
realignment of our mental and moral as- 
sets and liabilities, our present system of lit- 
erary and journalistic production and dis- 
tribution is due to come in for its full share 
of muck-raking and constructive criticism. 

The series of articles on The American 
Newspaper, by Will Irwin, published in 
Collier's Weekly during the summer of 1911, 
sufficiently foreshadows this tendency. A 
similar series of articles on The American 
Magazines by an author of equal reputa- 
tion, inspired by an equal passion for speak- 
ing the truth without fear or favor to any- 
one, might prove quite as much to the point. 

If our journalism, like the machine poli- 
tics that it represents, is our most crying na- 
tional disgrace today ; if numbers of our yel- 
lowest journals and the smuggest and most 



THE PESSIMISTS 155 

conventionally respectable of the American 
press "higher up" are the mouthpieces of 
Big Business, and directly or indirectly its 
paid prostitutes and liars, the very cynicism 
of their open immorality has served to di- 
vert public attention from other vital fac- 
tors in the formative processes of American 
thought and literary and social morality, 
that in the long run cannot and will not 
be disregarded. 

Any office boy that reads and reflects, that 
has any adequate sense of literary values in 
the up-to-date output of the American pub- 
lic library and magazine world, that has any 
real appreciation of the editorials and the 
best fiction in both The Popular Magazine 
and The Saturday Evening Post; can, if so 
inclined, frankly characterize and criticise 
the woman - produced - read - and - catered - to - 
literature of the day and hour in America, in 
terms that might well make Washington Ir- 
ving, Lowell, Lanier, Emerson and Haw- 
thorne turn over in their graves and gasp. 

At the same time it takes a social and lit- 



156 THE YOUNG IDEA 

erary vivisector of the first order like David 
Graham Phillips to reveal the pretenses and 
the posturings of the "good" woman of 
America — the conscious and unconscious lit- 
erary and artistic snobbery of the socially 
eligible and refined partners, wives, mothers, 
daughters and sisters of our most prominent 
malefactors of great wealth, and their subor- 
dinates and trade rivals — for exactly what 
they are worth. 

Poetry that is real, that is fit to survive 
through the centuries, needs no defence. 
Like truth, the very vital color of whose voice 
it is, it rises triumphant from each defeat 
to summon men and women to greater 
heights of aspiration, to greater intensities 
and charities of common humanity shared 
and exalted. Such poetry is ready for the 
making in America today. Great poetry 
like all great literature is born of storm and 
stress in the individual or the community. 

There never was a time in the history of 
the world when the material of such poetry, 
so rich and complex in its color scheme, so 



THE PESSIMISTS 157 

potent and vital in its content and inspira- 
tion, lay so close at hand beneath the eyes too 
blind to see it, as in America, the melting 
pot of the nations, today. 

And there never was a century in the his- 
tory of man's long struggle upward from the 
brute, when the heart and soul of a great na- 
tion were so restlessly expectant of some 
spiritual message, something of lasting and 
significant value in prose or verse, to give 
charm, color and power to the dreariness 
and debauchery of everyday, workaday ex- 
istence, as the beginning of this Twentieth 
Century and the present month, week, day 
and hour of this year of grace in convention- 
ally Christian America. 

Poetry and prose of this order of distinc- 
tion the System that dominates literary 
America has denied us ; and it is not too much 
to say that if fifty per cent of our most mis- 
representative American magazines for the 
high brow and the man in the street alike 
and some ninety per cent of their parasites 
and prostitutes, their numerous head-line 



158 THE YOUNG IDEA 

contributors, could be blotted out of exist- 
ence tomorrow, the American people as a 
whole would be better rather than worse off. 

This is said in all charity to literary pro- 
ducers, publishers, middlemen, agents, edi- 
tors, and sub-editors who, like their readers, 
have not the brains, the courage and the ca- 
pacity to free themselves from false posi- 
tions, and who remain equally the victims of 
the machine rule that today dominates every 
department of American life and literature. 

Outside the slum and the university, the 
misdirected and ineffectual energies of our 
conventional churches, the defective working 
of our free public educational system, and 
the tentative efforts of a few public libraries, 
mental and moral conservatism of the indi- 
vidual and the race is an undiscovered coun- 
try to the mass of the American people 
today. 

Men like Norris and Phillips have begun 
to unmask its vistas. The muck-rake maga- 
zines have revealed the exceeding grimness 
of its frontier. 



THE PESSIMISTS 159 

But in general we remain as we have been 
since the American pioneer learned to dom- 
inate the forest, the prairie, the desert, the 
mountains and the rivers by machinery, and 
in turn suffered the machinery that he had 
evolved to dominate him ; and we exist today 
a machine-made people, conventionalized, 
standardized, commercialized as to our food, 
clothes, houses, homes, offices, factories, 
theaters; amusements, social wants, pleas- 
ures and obligations; working plans; civic 
and social responsibilities, local and na- 
tional pride, and its absence or perver- 
sion. 

If a large fraction of the American people 
are systematically sweated and underfed, 
underpaid and overcharged, crowded into 
cars like cattle, and housed in dwellings 
where noise, dirt, infection and the extremes 
of heat and cold are variable quantities, al- 
ways to be met and fought with, not in the 
slums alone; obviously the physical stamina 
and morals of the race must in the long run 
suffer, while the mean mental and moral level 



160 THE YOUNG IDEA 

must at the same time be brutalized and de- 
based. 

Today we have our pure food law and its 
evasions, demonstrations of one sort or an- 
other against the meat trust and the coal 
trust, and the present perplexities of our 
public utilities commission. 

Similarly, corporate aggressions against 
the public domains and organized looting of 
water, forest, and mineral rights have finally 
resulted in a national programme of conser- 
vation in things material. 

We have not yet reached the point of de- 
manding a pure thought law, a legal re- 
striction of the yellowest phases of our yel- 
low journalism, or a national movement for 
the conservation of literary opportunity and 
reward, and of the comparatively small pro- 
portion of his or her time that the average 
American can or will devote to any printed 
matter that is not mere journalism or the 
news of the day. 

Such a movement is bound to come some 
time. It will depend when it does come far 



THE PESSIMISTS 161 

more on the canons of sound and scientific 
criticism of literature and life in the largest 
sense, than on any possible or impossible ar- 
bitrary legal enactment. 

At the same time, if any protective tariff 
is at all desirable or legitimate at any period 
of American growth, the details of an amend- 
ment to our national copyright law exacting 
a national tax in the form of a cumulative 
royalty on every copyrighted foreign book 
and serial publication of recent date, and 
the requirement of copyright registration 
and similar cumulative royalties in the case 
of foreign plays produced on the American 
stage, might be arranged easily enough, once 
the mass of the American people made up 
its mind that such a state of things was 
desirable, and determined to have it. 

Such a remedy might be far from ideal ; at 
any rate, it could hardly leave American lit- 
erature and the American stage in a worse 
state than that in which we find them both 
today. 

It would at least relieve us of the commer- 



162 THE t YOUNG IDEA 

cialized immoralities and hysterics of im- 
ported Elinor Glyns and the Marie Corellis, 
and leave us the power to deal adequately 
with our own Chamberses and McCutcheons. 

It might reduce local consumption of 
Materlinck, Shaw and Chesterton. It might 
at the same time stimulate the production 
of essentially American playwrights, poets, 
novelists, essayists and critics. 

It would at least help to stimulate our 
racial sense of ultimate destiny in the world 
of thought and of literature, and our national 
acceptance of the fact that literature, like 
all other human phenomena, is distinctly a 
product of environment in the material, as 
well as the spiritual sense. 

During the last forty months my persua- 
sion of America's immediate emergence to- 
ward ultimate destiny and her general rec- 
ognition of any vital need of the inspiration 
that poetry and literature in general achieves 
has been more or less modified. Super- 
ficially, we have gone from bad to worse, by 
machinery, in world's record time. This may 



THE PESSIMISTS 163 

be merely the recurrent and material sag in 
the wave of human progress, whose crest, 
even today, demands generations and cen- 
turies of striving toward. This small item 
on the credit side of the account remains ; in 
the history of the literature of eve; y lost na- 
tion once worthy to have a history and a lit- 
erature, the period immediately preceding 
final national decadence and fall was that of 
the finest flowering of the art and literature 
in question. This may be) true today of 
Belgium, also unprepared to a certain ex- 
tent. (In Belgium's case we, like the rest of 
the world, are still entitled to have our 
doubts. In our own case, it is hard to believe 
that Robert W. Chambers, Henry James, 
Harold Bell Wright, George Sylvester Vie- 
rick, Gertrude Atherton and Marjorie Ben- 
ton Cooke any more fully, firmly and finally 
represent or misrepresent us than William 
Jennings Bryan, Henry Ford, Woodrow 
Wilson, Josephus Daniels and Newton D. 
Baker do.) 

In the meantime, we are assured by publi- 



164 THE YOUNG IDEA 

cists of one brand or another that there is a 
new movement toward a new and larger free- 
dom in art and literature as well as life. 
Probably there was some such movement in 
Babel just before the confusion of tongues 
was achieved, and the work of the first sky- 
scraper on record was brought to an abrupt 
conclusion. If our literary and artistic inter- 
pretations have so far failed to measure up 
to our skyscrapers and their builders, and 
the builders of the foundations on which 
those skyscrapers were reared ; it may be the 
world's loss no less than ours. Again, it may 
not be. Literary publishers and producers 
seem to take temporary ebulliences of inter- 
est and inversions of technic in American 
poetry, like American painting today, en- 
tirely too seriously. One is led to suspect a 
certain commercialism, not to say cynicism, 
in certain publishers and art dealers — to go 
no further — in this respect. And for the 
mass of intelligent American readers and 
appreciators, the new poetry, like the new 
art in America, which has begun by claim- 



THE PESSIMISTS 165 

ing everything (and so assumed a very con- 
siderable burden of proof), has yet, save in 
the case of sporadic and technical instances, 
to prove its case. 

More recently, Mr. Louis Untermeyer, 
for many of whose poems and for much of 
whose critical information in detail I have 
a very real respect and regard, makes him- 
self the spokesman of a get-together move- 
ment in American literature Common, 
Poetry Preferred, which, on the surface at 
least, has to do with the spirit no less than 
the letter of the law. He tells us that our 
thinking is improving architecturally . . . 
a hundred undermined and rotting formulas 
have been explored and . . . And poetry, 
being the most patrician of all the crafts, 
has at least become democratized. All this 
and a good deal that follows this in some 
three thousand words of "a compilation of 
three causeries which were published in the 
Review of Reviews, the New York Evening 
Post and the Chicago Evening Post/' which 
was mailed me late in November this vear, 



166 THE YOUNG IDEA 

appears to me to be more in the nature of 
a rather too optimistic resume than an abso- 
lutely constructive and impartial criticism. 
At the same time, as Percy Mackaye says, 
"poetry needs to be advertised." 

I believe that Mr. Untermeyer is sincere 
and close to the truth when he says: "For 
poetry is something more than a graceful, 
literary escape from life. It is a spirited 
encounter with it." But in his compilation 
of our poetic assets and personalities in 
America up to date, and in the general trend 
of the times, I do not find conclusive evidence 
that poetry in America today is proportion* 
ately any nearer to perfection technically or 
any more of a counsel of perfection in the 
lives of rich and poor, the masses and the 
illuminati, than it was three years, or a little 
more than three years, ago. With all due re- 
spect for Mr. Brownell and one or two of the 
younger men connected with The New Re- 
public and the Seven Arts Magazine and Mr. 
Untermeyer himself, I do not believe there 
is a single critic in America today qualified 



THE PESSIMISTS 167 

by position and native capacity to interpret 
American literary tendencies authoritatively 
any more than there is a single American 
poet today capable of inspiring and repre- 
senting his generation as Whitman and 
Pope did theirs. 

Rather than the blurbs and the business of 
blurbing, the American people, its poets and 
other authors today need a little sound sense 
and salutory humility in esteeming accur- 
ately and impartially their approximate im- 
portance in the cosmic scheme of things. 

Talma said to Rachel once: "A little sor- 
row is what you need, my child, to make of 
you a great actress." But the American 
nation today needs more. 

More than a hundred years ago Alexander 
Pope wrote: "A little knowledge is a dan- 
gerous thing," and failed to realize just how 
little the little learning easily come by of 
the machine, of the public school, of the pub- 
lic library, of the typical American daily 
morning and evening paper and monthly 
magazine would have for us today. 



168 THE YOUNG IDEA 

If American literature in the last fifty 
years of easy money since our Civil War 
has not made good as Russian literature has 
in the lives of Turgenev, Tolstoi, Dostoiev- 
sky, Gogol, Gorki, Andreyev and their con- 
temporaries, in the permanent products of 
organized human thought and emotion, it is 
true that Russian literature, like Russian 
life, fights and bleeds today for freedom and 
racial expression, and in the fighting and 
bleeding is finding herself. 

Russia out of her Nihilists and her ikons 
and the blind urge toward light of her masses 
has achieved a national literature that voices 
a national soul. In the meanwhile, we have 
manufactured and exploited the literature of 
the advertising page and porter, the market 
report, the society column, the yellow jour- 
nal, the yellower magazine, the telephone 
book, the motor blue book, the Christian Sci- 
ence reading room, the feminist and pacifist 
propaganda, the Congressional Record and 
the moving picture scenario. We have also 
produced an Anthony Comstock and his 



THE PESSIMISTS 169 

successor, the lady novelist, the newer school 
of feminism in fiction, the sporting page and 
Sunday supplement cartoon serial, the 
motor art catalogue, the prospectus of the 
hotel and the train de luxe, and the publish- 
er's blurb. 

Under all these more or less superficial 
passions in print and signs of the times it 
may be that the soul of America is still 
dumbly and passionately awake, still 
urgently striving through the richest mate- 
rial for prose and verse that any nation has 
ever known toward something like adequate 
and inspiring national expression. It may 
be that among our young men already be- 
ginning to be known there is another Frank 
Norris, another David Graham Phillips, an- 
other Stephen Crane, another William 
Vaughn Moody in the making. It may be, 
but the signs of the times say otherwise. 

If the American Democracy today is fun- 
damentally more than a counterfeit democ- 
racy of pretence, on a paper basis expressed 
in notes to Germany and the voice of the 



170 THE YOUNG IDEA 

press-agent everywhere, if it is anything 
more than the scum of the world's melting 
pot, all these matters will arrange themselves 
racially in time. 
Otherwise not. 



THE TRADITIONALISTS 



THE TRADITIONALISTS 

The point of view of the six authors who 
have been grouped here as traditionalists re- 
ceives its fullest explanation in the essay con- 
tributed by Mr. Ledoux. They unite in 
believing that contemporary poetry has 
discovered no new beauty to us, that its chief 
emphasis has been put upon matters of tech- 
nique which, when all is said and done, are 
neither new nor of compelling importance. 
They feel that our life is unorganized and 
chaotic, and that the lack of form in which 
it has found expression interprets nothing 
essentially enduring. In contrast to the 
poets who seek to react to those phases of 
experience which are peculiarly of our own 
time, and which give life here and now in 
173 



174 THE YOUNG IDEA 

America those qualities which distinguish it 
from the past, the traditionalists assert that 
the fundamental truths of life are change- 
less, and that it is the poet's business to deal 
with eternal truths, and that a work of art 
which is concerned chiefly with what is 
contemporary must be truly vital to sur- 
vive the passing away of its temporary 
allusion. 

Mrs. Fannie Stearns Gifford is well known 
as a writer of charming lyrics. 

It seems to me that in Poetry, as in the 
other arts, there cannot be any real novelty. 
Poetry is like a great fact of Nature. The 
Force of Gravity remains the same forever. 
There is nothing new about it except the new 
discoveries that may be made as to its 
powers ; the new application of its powers to 
the uses of life. 

So Poetry is never old, and never new. 
Its struggle is the ancient one to breathe the 
wind of spiritual beauty and undying truth 



TRADITIONALISTS 175 

into material transiencies. The only real 
question about Poetry is not whether it uses 
regular rhythms and rhymes, or odd free 
forms; not whether it interprets its sub- 
jects directly or by remote suggestions, but 
whether it is Poetry or not, by any of the 
final tests. These tests are most difficult to 
define or describe, but they include the quali- 
ties of beauty, power and truth in all their 
familiar and unfamiliar phases. 

The "New Poetry" of which one hears so 
constantly today seems to me an attempt, 
sometimes sincere, sometimes meritricious, to 
express the restless and troubled spirit of 
the age in restless and unrestrained forms. 
Its novelty consists in only one element: its 
emphasis on the freedom of the poet to use 
matter and manner hitherto dogmatically 
banned as "unpoetical." 

Eut the task (or joy) of the Poet is un- 
changed. A painter whose palette has held 
only dim neutral tints may discover wild 
blues and greens and reds free for his use, 
but his problems will not be new nor his 



176 THE YOUNG IDEA 

powers heightened. A poet in a paradise of 
bizarre imaginings and untrammelled verse 
must still see and speak according to his own 
vision, or he is not poet at all. 

It is difficult for me to classify Poetry; 
and when I find it classified, a curious revul- 
sion sweeps over me, and I am inclined to 
echo Gamaliel's words: 

"If this counsel be of men, it will come to 
naught ; but if it be of God, ye cannot over- 
throw it." 

All new movements in Poetry or in life 
must finally be left to the same impartial 
judgment. 

My own verse has, I think, no relationship 
to any movement. It is made up of echoes 
of other people's poetry, and of my own 
chance imaginings. In form it belongs 
clearly to the "old" type, for I like the music 
of almost song-like rhythms and cadences. 
It is, for me, a highly personal possession, 
somewhat like the clothes I make for myself 
or the flowers I try to grow, both in interest 
and in negligibility. 



TRADITIONALISTS 177 

But, fortunately, other American poets 
have a higher idealism and a broader calling. 
The work of Josephine Preston Peabody is 
to me representative of the best type of 
Poetry that America is writing now. Her 
alert, human sympathy, her vision of high, 
unfading truth, and her powers of beautiful 
song, satisfy more honest and deep demands 
than any of the so-called "New" schools of 
verse. There are other poets with the same 
ideals, if not the same ways of expressing 
them. 

A man must have Air, and Water, and 
Sleep, and Work, and Love, over and over 
and over. Like all those great simplicities, 
Poetry is Poetry, over and over and over. 

Mr. Louis V. Ledoux has found his in- 
spiration chiefly in Greek legend. His most 
recent volume, "The Story of Eleusis," is 
a poetic drama of great beauty and deep 
spiritual vision. His essay is important as 
a criticism of the new spirit in our poetry 
from the viewpoint of a conservative. 



178 THE YOUNG IDEA 

The history of art, like the history of any- 
thing else, is the record of cycles of bloom 
and decay. The course of literature is a 
series of movements which are like the slow 
swinging of some great pendulum, or would 
be like it were there not present in art, as 
in life, a gradual evolution which makes any 
cycle, any one swing of the pendulum, a little 
different from its predecessor and renders 
the image inexact. What happens in art is 
like, in a smaller way, what happens in na- 
ture: earth moves through a perpetual re- 
currence of Spring and Autumn from some 
beginning of which we know little to some 
end of which we know nothing at all; but 
in this apparent repetition there is a com- 
paratively unapparent growth, a principle 
of change that can only be observed in a 
series of centuries. The pendulum swing of 
literature is easier to follow than is its evo- 
lution. 

There are only a limited number of great 
ideas, or distinctive mental and emotional 
attitudes toward life, and these are period- 



TRADITIONALISTS 179 

ically discovered by new generations of 
artists just as each new generation of chil- 
dren discovers for itself certain facts of life 
which come to them with the force of a pre- 
viously withheld revelation. Some one prob- 
ably had announced the return to nature 
idea before Longus wrote "Daphnis and 
Chloe," and when time was ripe Rousseau, 
Bernardin de St. Pierre, Chateaubriand and 
the others of that age discovered it again; 
soon, when the force that was in Walt Whit- 
man has been spent, some one will rean- 
nounce the return to nature, and the an- 
nouncement will be of as much value and 
novelty to the new generation as that made 
by Longus was to the one in which he lived. 
Just now in America there is a tendency to 
consider the life of the laboring classes — 
the comparatively uneducated and unpros- 
perous — the best material for poetry; the 
pendulum is where it was when Crabbe wrote 
his Tales of village life and Wordsworth 
gave English literature a "new" subject, and 
precisely where it was when the poets and 



180 THE YOUNG IDEA 

sculptors of third century Greece were pro- 
ducing statuettes of fagot-gatherers bowed 
beneath their burdens and writing idylls and 
comedies about the problems of the prole- 
tariat. 

Much has been said lately about what is 
called "the new poetry," the claim of novelty 
being based apparently on three things: 
First, the predilection for subjects taken 
from the life of what used to be the lower 
classes and the interest in social problems 
seen from the point of view of the oppressed 
or unfortunate; second, the fondness for 
distinctively contemporary and probably 
ephemeral adjuncts such as the sky-scraper 
and the Ford car; and third, the develop- 
ment of a new form of expression necessi- 
tated by the newness of the thing to be ex- 
pressed. The validity of the first claim has 
been somewhat inadequately discussed al- 
ready, and of the second it may be said that 
the use of contemporary adjuncts does more 
to militate against the endurance of a work 
of art than anything else could ; only a poem 



TRADITIONALISTS 181 

of extraordinary vitality can live under such 
a burden. A lesser poet than Dante could 
not have survived the amount of contempo- 
rary scientific achievement and political dis- 
sension that makes the Divine Comedy a 
happy pasture for the Scholiast ; but a more 
simple instance may be drawn from Aristo- 
phanes. No author is more filled than he 
with contemporary and local allusions ; to un- 
derstand half of what his original audience 
got from him it is necessary to master a vol- 
ume of footnotes greater than that of the 
text, but no one except an antiquarian would 
read Aristophanes for the things in his work 
that were primarily of contemporary im- 
portance. One of his plays opens somewhat 
as follows — I am quoting from memory and 
away from my books: 

Which of the old jokes shall I crack, Master? 
Almost any of them ; the audience is sure to 
laugh, but for God's sake don't tell the story 
about So-and-So; that's too old. 

The story about So-and-So is as much of a 



182 THE YOUNG IDEA 

mystery to me as what happened to old 
Grouse in the gun-room; but that element 
in the bit of dialogue which is not dependent 
upon the contemporary point makes the lines 
for all time a perfect opening for comedy. 
The admission of a Ford car or a sky-scraper 
into a poem will tend to diminish rather than 
to increase its chance of enduring, and con- 
sequently, its value as a work of art. 

The third point upon which the exponents 
of the "new poetry" base their claim to new- 
ness and, what is of considerably more im- 
portance, to artistic worth, is the form in 
which they express what they have to say. 
This is merely a question of technique, and 
is of little interest to anyone except artisans 
of the poetic craft. The layman is like a 
person surrounded by a high board fence on 
the other side of which are stretches of beau- 
tiful landscape; the business of the poet is 
to make a hole for him through which he 
can see the beauty that is beyond, and to the 
man inside it matters little how the hole is 
made, the vision is what he needs to have 



TRADITIONALISTS 183 

given him. A question of technique would 
not be mentioned here had not some writers 
of verse obtruded it on public attention, in- 
sisting that holes must be bored with a gim- 
let rather than with an auger, and this must 
be answered. The view on the other side of 
the fence is in no way different from what 
it always has been, and the poet is free to 
choose whatever tool suits him best; he must 
remember, however, that the sole reason for 
making the hole is to give the man inside 
a vision that he could not have gotten with- 
out the poetic intermediary. Augers and 
gimlets are equally useless when the hole is 
made in a board beyond which there is noth- 
ing, for what the poet says is of infinitely 
more importance than is the choice of the 
form in which he chooses to say it. 

The exponents of free-verse have claimed 
that it was a new development in art, and 
the validity of this claim must also be dis- 
cussed. There is nothing new about the free- 
verse of the present except the exaggeration 
of its use; all competent writers from the 



184 THE YOUNG IDEA 

Greek dramatists downward have introduced 
metrical variations to avoid monotony, and 
particularly to produce certain special 
effects, usually of emphasis. This tend- 
ency to exaggerate a minor point of tech- 
nique is characteristic of contemporary 
art just as other forms of exaggeration 
are characteristic of contemporary life; 
there was a sculptor not long ago who real- 
ized poignantly what everyone had always 
known, that the human head is shaped more 
like an egg than it is like an orange and the 
busts he produced emphasized the ovoid form 
to the exclusion of all traces of physiognomy. 
Perfection of form certainly cannot hurt a 
work of art, and the demand that artistic ex- 
pression should be a primitive rhythmic is 
based on instinct. 

The other so-called modern schools can all 
be related to something in the past; Imag- 
ism, for example, in its practice, if not in its 
theory, is like an unconscious revival of the 
Elizabethan conceit. The slopes of Par- 
nassus have always been covered with mush- 



TRADITIONALISTS 185 

rooms, but in the restless eagerness and hurry 
of our life we are prone to rush out into the 
wilderness after new things, and when the 
artist out there calls loudly enough about 
the novelty of his wares, we run to see, for- 
getting the gist of the whole matter, which 
is this : a new thing, like an old one, may be 
either worthless or of value; the quality of 
newness or the reverse that is in it having 
little or nothing to do with its worth as 
poetry or as an interpretation of life. A 
Ford car might be mentioned in a poor poem 
or a good one, the fact of its mention neither 
raises nor diminishes the value of the piece, 
for the things that the poet's vision ought to 
make him see are things that endure, and 
these are without necessary localization in 
time or place — as true to San Francisco as 
to Athens, to New York as to Pekin. The 
setting of a poem makes little difference. 

America is uncrystallized in its democracy, 
in its life and, by consequence, in its art; a 
chaos cannot be expressed or interpreted by 
crystallized forms and uncrystallized form- 



186 THE YOUNG IDEA 

lessness, while it may express, without art, 
cannot interpret. The crystal that may ulti- 
mately appear has not yet been defined, and 
while many contrary tendencies are discern- 
ible, there is no definite indication of the fu- 
ture. The pendulum swings, and after one 
period follows another; but in each succes- 
sion there is variation, and the swinging has 
always been accompanied by a number of 
eccentric attempts to get away from the 
track. 

The question as to the relation of my own 
work to the present state and future pros- 
pects of American poetry is a difficult one 
to answer. A wave does not go in an oppo- 
site direction to the rest of the sea, and all 
I can say is that to my mind the essential, 
enduring things of life being infinitely va- 
ried, it is the business of the poet simply 
to make his hole in that part of the fence 
where he believes what he can show to be 
at its finest, to bring as much of his 
vision as he can, as much interpretation as 
he can to the man inside, and to leave ten- 



TRADITIONALISTS 187 

dencies on the knees of the gods. I cannot, 
however, see the advantage of putting the 
hole in the back of the fence, where only a 
brick wall will be disclosed, or the neighbors' 
wash which hung out today will tomorrow be 
gone, when there is the great sweep of hill 
and valley in front. There are certain things 
that every one in all time must face, — death, 
for example, — and if the poet illumines them 
he has a better chance of reaching more peo- 
ple for a longer period than if he treats of 
things in their aspects that have merely tem- 
porary significance for a few. Men die at 
one place as at another, and in its essentials 
the problem was the same to the caveman 
that it is to the factory-worker. What a 
poet has to say — the power and quality of 
his vision — is what counts, and this comes to 
him from without, or from within, and usu- 
ally is independent of volition ; all he can do, 
and each for himself alone must strive faith- 
fully to do it, is to express what he finds in 
him in the best manner that is possible for 
him to attain. Poetry is not a parlor accom- 



188 THE YOUNG IDEA 

plishment, nor a means of notoriety, and the 
genuine poet, especially in the America of 
to-day, is under obligations to others as well 
as to himself. 

This is not a formal essay; it is merely an 
attempt to answer the given questions as 
directly and as concisely as possible; and I 
have limited what has been said to the sub- 
ject of poetry. Much of what I have tried 
to bring out, however, can be applied with 
equal justice to other branches of literature 
and to other arts, particularly to painting. 

Mr. John G. Neihardt is well known as 
the author of "The Song of Hugh Glass," 
"The Quest," several other volumes of verse, 
two novels, "The Dawn Builder" and "Life's 
Lure," a volume of short stories entitled, 
"The Lonesome Trail," and a book of travel, 
"The River and I." 

During the past six years something over 
two thousand new books, representing every 
phase of modern literature, have passed 
through my hands. About half of these I 



TRADITIONALISTS 189 

have read, and the rest I have scanned. I 
am now reading at the least three represen- 
tative current books every week and scan- 
ning as many more volumes. As a result of 
this rather strenuous experience I am con- 
vinced that a new movement is indeed mani- 
fest in our literature. As to its ideals, they 
are, as everybody knows, supposed to be con- 
cerned with democracy. Its relation to the 
Past is, in general, the relation of a brilliant 
upstart youth to his dogmatic elders. 

The storm-center of the literary revolt we 
are now witnessing is undoubtedly in poetry, 
and for the sake of brevity I prefer to limit 
my remarks thereto. As I have noted, the 
"new" poetry is said to be democratic. It is 
democratic in the sense that nearly everyone 
seems to be engaged in writing it; for now 
that the difficulties of the art have been re- 
moved, a long and faithful apprenticeship 
seems no longer to be necessary. Anyone 
possessing pen, paper and an assortment of 
vague emotions may easily qualify. Thus 
the realm of poetry has been fitted with 



190 THE YOUNG IDEA 

strictly modern improvements. One no 
longer scales Parnassus; one takes the ele- 
vator. The "new" poetry is democratic also 
in the sense that the majority of our poets 
profess to be greatly in love with the Peo- 
ple. Posterity will decide as to how much 
of this is pose, inspired by that overwraught 
humanitarianism now so much in vogue. As 
a reaction against a barren formalism, the 
"new" poetry will no doubt serve a good 
purpose in the end. Experimentation is al- 
ways necessary in a universe where rigidity 
is death. 

But I do not forget, as many of my con- 
temporaries seem to do, that the world did 
not begin with the present decade ; that world 
literature is a living thing; that its body is 
tradition, and that a poet can no more dis- 
pense at will with that tradition than he can 
dispense with that complex of psychic ten- 
dencies which he inherits from his ancestors 
and with which, plus his individual experi- 
ences, he must build his own unique person- 
ality. 



TRADITIONALISTS 191 

Further, I know, as any student of great 
poetry must know, that by ignoring the Past 
the poet deliberately sacrifices the chief 
source of poetic power. For it is mainly by 
appealing to memory that poetry works its 
magic: and the individual memory is too 
brief, too fragmentary. The racial memory, 
rich with the distilled experience of countless 
men and women, is necessary; and racial 
memory is literary tradition. 

So much for substance. As to method, I 
am disposed to question those who talk so 
glibly of "free form" and w^ho apparently do 
not understand that freedom cannot be real- 
ized except by obedience to unyielding law. 
I suspect that these "vers librists" confuse 
the meaning of "freedom" and "license" — 
a confusion characteristic of all so-called 
"democratic" revolts. I find, also, that as 
sense of form decreases, vagueness of 
thought generally increases. 

The key to the situation, it has seemed to 
me, is generally overlooked. We err in fan- 
cying that democracy is anything more than 



192 THE YOUNG IDEA 

a dream. So far, all that has ever resulted 
from a so-called "democratic" revolt has been 
a state of anarchy. We speak of "demo- 
cratic" America; and America is not demo- 
cratic, but individualistic — the exact oppo- 
site. Likewise, we speak of a democratic 
movement in poetry. What we have is an 
individualistic movement ; and individualism 
is anarchy. 

From our economic system on up (or 
down!) to our moral code, we are either in- 
dividualistic or are rapidly drifting in that 
direction. And that is why we are experi- 
encing an orgy of unsupported individual 
opinion in nearly every field of human en- 
deavor — religion conspicuously included! 
We have already repudiated or are tending 
to repudiate all standards of judgment 
(which are the result of the accumulated ex- 
perience of the race), and we have set up 
individual caprice as a guide. For this rea- 
son we have few authoritative critics. 

But I am no pessimist. On the contrary, 
I have the greatest confidence in the future 



TRADITIONALISTS 193 

of American poetry. Already we have some 
very remarkable poets and others are in the 
making. The change which will reveal the 
good and destroy the bad in the new move- 
ment will, it seems to me, be primarily eco- 
nomic and governmental. On the economic 
side, individualism must be crushed. On the 
governmental side, there must be a strong 
centralization of power, bringing back to the 
people the fine old sense of obedience which 
we have temporarily lost. Some great na- 
tional danger will probably hasten that in- 
evitable change. Powder smoke might 
cleanse us. 

Mr. Edward Arlington Robinson, author 
of "The Town Down the River," "Captain 
Craig," "The Man Against the Sky," and 
of a comedy, "Van Zorn," has, perhaps more 
than any other of our contemporary poets, 
sought to express an intellectual content in 
his verse. 

You ask me if I think there is a new move- 
ment in poetry, and my reply is that there 



194 THE YOUNG IDEA 

is always a new movement in poetry. There 
is always a new movement in everything, in- 
cluding each new inch of each new revolution 
of the earth around the sun. But if you 
mean to ask me if this new movement implies 
necessarily any radical change in the struc- 
ture or in the general nature of what the 
world has agreed thus far to call poetry, I 
shall have to tell you that I do not think so 
■ — knowing very well that my answer is worth 
no more than that of any other relatively in- 
telligent individual. 

In referring to a new movement I assume 
that you refer primarily to vers libre — a 
form, or lack of form, that may or may not 
produce pleasant results. I do not know 
that there is any final reason why this mode 
of expression should not give pleasure as 
often as any other, although I do know, so 
far as I am concerned, that in the majority 
of cases it does not. I have read furlongs 
of it, but the amount that has given me any 
solid satisfaction could easily be measured 
in a few yards at the most. I say this with 



TRADITIONALISTS 195 

reluctance, for I know that some of my 
friends will disagree with me entirely, and 
be tempted in all probability to call me 
names. Some of them may call me a con- 
servative, others a reactionary; and all this 
in spite of the fact that I have been accused 
in the past of being, if anything, too modern. 
But these accusations were made long ago; 
and I fancy that my limited public has come 
by this time to see that I was never so peril- 
ously modern, after all. 

If there be a new movement in poetry 
that can be definitely labeled, such a move- 
ment will probably be found to have more 
to do with vocabulary and verbal arrange- 
ment than with metrical or non-metrical 
form. The poetry of the next few hundred 
years will in all probability have an incisive- 
ness and a clarity that have not generally 
prevailed heretofore, and some of the best of 
it may be written in vers Wore; although my 
own opinion is that most of the best of it will 
be written in some form or other that shall 
have a definite metrical pattern. I may be 



196 THE YOUNG IDEA 

grievously in the wrong, yet it seems to me 
that up to this time vers libre has been its 
own worst indictment, in that perhaps less 
than one per cent of it may be said to pos- 
sess the quality that gives pleasure. In spite 
of the fact that it has produced several in- 
teresting and stimulating results, I am in- 
clined to the belief that the vers litre move- 
ment has seen its best days, and that the few 
writers who have succeeded in making it in- 
teresting are still to do their best work along 
more traditional lines, in which there is room 
for any amount of innovation and variety. 
But, as I said before, my opinion is merely 
that of an individual, possibly prejudiced, 
and is, therefore, to be taken as such and as 
nothing more. 

In reply to your request for a criticism of 
contemporary American literature, perhaps 
I had better keep to the subject of poetry 
and express my belief in the genuineness of 
its "revival" and in the significance of much 
that has been published during the past few 
years. 



TRADITIONALISTS 197 

Mrs. Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff 's most 
recent volume is "Eris." 

It is my belief that the new movement in 
modern literature and art is an expression 
of social democracy, a note of international- 
ism that indicates the attitude of the world 
today. The European war has brought all 
nations face to face with the sternest facts 
of existence, and as a result poetry has be- 
come inoculated with a vigorous realism — it 
is stripped of symbol and romantic sugges- 
tion ; flowering artifice having been discarded 
for sturdier forms of feeling. Huysmans, 
Zola, Verhaeren and Gide in France, and 
Masefield in England, have been the progen- 
itors of the present realistic movement in 
poetry. It satisfies modern cosmopolitan 
needs; but, in my opinion, it is only an 
ephemeral current that will be replaced by 
a reactionary aristocracy in life and letters. 
Just as from archaic art emerged the efflor- 
escence of Hellenic sculpture, so from 
Cubism, Imagism and all the various pres- 



198 THE YOUNG IDEA 

ent-day schools there will occur a reversion 
to intellectual austerity. Art has a temper- 
amental flux that varies with the impulse of 
the age — so ultimately in all countries there 
must re-arise, as a reflex of modern realism, 
a more austere technique, a truer emotional- 
ism and a finer spirituality in poetry. The 
idealism of antiquity will re-awaken to tem- 
per our boisterous modernism, and to tran- 
quilize the realistic democracy of American 
art. 

My own work is naturally influenced to a 
certain degree by the modern impetus — but 
essentially I prefer the artistic ideal of Mar- 
lowe, of Shelley, of Swinburne, of Sophocles, 
of Milton. But I feel that the student of the 
classical cannot exempt himself without loss 
from the modern trend of art which, despite 
its many unfortunate aspects, is a vigorous 
infusion of new energies. 

Mr. Thomas Walsh is known for his beau- 
tiful poems dealing with the history and the 



TRADITIONALISTS 199 

art of Spain, "The Pilgrim Kings: Greco 
and Goya, and Other Poems of Spain." 

There is nothing new under the sun, not 
even today: and it does not seem to me that 
we have any new elements in our literary 
production that give any warrant for doubt 
of the belief that the future will be as the 
past. The Papal Delegate, Archbishop 
Bonzano — a man of unusual culture — 
summed up our American literature as 
"plentiful," and his irony reveals the atti- 
tude of the matured scholar in the presence 
of the clamors of the very young and the 
very wild. 

There has been a great deal of very dis- 
jointed reasoning regarding the rules of 
aesthetics that were settled, it seemed, some 
thousand years ago; and we have beheld in 
these discussions the results of that modern 
philosophy which abandons and flouts at 
any connected relation between the different 
branches of human knowledge and morals. 
The young radical of today's letters is the 



200 THE YOUNG IDEA 

natural son of Matthew Arnold and his 
school, although I think Arnold himself 
would be rather surprised at the progeny he 
has produced. The abandonment of law and 
order in philosophy has merely preceded the 
abandonment of law and order in the arts. 
Our young writers are honestly expressing 
themselves; they are possessed of a lawless 
sympathy with everything, whether it should 
have sympathy or not. Mercy has been de- 
clared the most modern virtue in literature, 
but it seems we have reached a point where 
it has become stupidity. 

To me the real performances in literature 
today are very much akin to those of the past 
generations. There is an added quality of 
simplicity and sincerity, but the same mate- 
rials and the same general ambitions and 
spirit. Today our audiences are more mixed 
and, from an Anglo-Celtic point of view, 
more alien to the standards that have ruled 
us in America in the past. Art still remains 
the expression and the enjoyment of the few 
— who seem fewer today only because of the 



TRADITIONALISTS 201 

greatness of the variety of outsiders who are 
untutored and unprepared for an opinion, 
not to mention taking a hand in its current 
production. 



CONCLUSION 



CONCLUSION 

The results of this investigation require 
little interpretation. Certain conclusions 
are immediately apparent. There is a sin- 
gular unanimity of opinion with respect to 
the predominating tendency in our contem- 
porary writing; a return upon life, and, 
more specifically, upon contemporary Amer- 
ican life, as the subject matter of our writ- 
ing. The younger writers are urging as their 
claim to attention that they are dealing with 
the life which they see about them, and of 
which they are a part, and that they are deal- 
ing with this life in its own terms ; they are 
quick to perceive the poetic core of common 
experience, and it is this that they would re- 
veal in their art. They have, in Mr. Unter- 
meyer's eloquent phrase, discovered the 
205 



206 THE YOUNG IDEA 

beauty and dignity, and, one might add, the 
romance of the commonplace. This discov- 
ery is not without its peculiar significance. 
For, in dealing with the everyday life of our 
democracy, they are forced to take into ac- 
count the disproportion between its basis in 
ideality and its functioning in actuality. 
Thus it is that contemporary literature, and 
particularly contemporary poetry, is ex- 
pressing a social content. In their primary 
task of actually living, the poets are discov- 
ering as the foundation upon which rests our 
national life the articulate masses who are 
striving for self-expression, and they are ex- 
pressing the thoughts, the feelings, the hopes 
and the tragedies of these masses in their 
verse. They are appealing to us less as 
lovers of art than as lovers of life, they are 
striving to move our humanity, to arouse a 
social consciousness. They conceive art as 
a means of expressing life, and since they are 
taking as their province the whole of life, 
they would be bound by no traditional con- 
ceptions of beauty. If we urge against them 



CONCLUSION 207 

a preoccupation with the sordid, the violent 
and the hideous, they will answer us that all 
these are phases of the life which they are 
experiencing. And they will show us where- 
in they have been revealing the new beauty 
which is being evolved in the democracy of 
labor. They are confident idealists, seeking 
to reconstruct our life by widening and deep- 
ening our conceptions of experience. In 
aesthetics, therefore, they are distinctly revo- 
lutionists, revolting against the view that art 
is a refuge from life and vigorously refusing 
allegiance to a tradition which they feel 
would limit not only the content of their art, 
but the form in which that content is to 
achieve expression. 

There is, however, in these expressions of 
opinion less discussion of poetic form than 
one would naturally expect in a time when 
our notions of poetic form seem superficially 
to be undergoing a process of far-reaching 
and deliberate modification. The emphasis 
of the poets seems rather to be in the direc- 
tion of content ; it is as though they believed 



208 THE YOUNG IDEA 

that content shapes its own form and that the 
business of the reader lies with the content 
of art, and with its form only indirectly, in 
determining whether the medium of expres- 
sion is the best possible medium for convey- 
ing the particular emotional experience of 
which it is the vehicle. No one who reads, to 
choose a striking example, the essay of Mr. 
Arthur Davison Ficke can doubt that the 
various metrical experiments of the new 
schools are less a deliberate program of re- 
form in poetic diction than the logical result 
of a fresh way of looking at life. 

There is, likewise, a vigorous recognition 
of an increasing seriousness in outlook 
among our writers, a disposition to penetrate 
beneath the merely superficial externalities 
of life, and to seek for fundamental spiritual 
values. I have grouped together four poets 
who have emphasized this spirit most 
strongly under a single heading, but the bar- 
riers of classification break down upon this 
question. Mr. Joyce Kilmer, for example, 
whose work in both poetry and prose reveals 



CONCLUSION 209 

as sure a discovery of the romance of the 
commonplace as does any of the writers 
grouped under that general heading, believes 
that the most important tendency in our con- 
temporary literature is its expression of spir- 
itual experience. It would not be just to 
deny the existence of this tendency in the 
work of other poets who are not grouped 
with Mr. Kilmer. It is, perhaps, more hon- 
est to say that the poets are reacting to spir- 
itual experience in the terms of a more 
homely reality than heretofore. 

The differences existing between the con- 
servatives and the radicals are admirably 
illustrated by a comparison between the con- 
tributions of Miss Margaret Widdemer and 
Mr. Louis Ledoux. Miss Widdemer tells 
us that today the poets are reflecting the atti- 
tude toward life of their own time, and of an 
experience produced by the special circum- 
stances of life here and now in America. Mr. 
Ledoux reminds us that the fundamental 
realities of life are changeless, and that their 
contemporary attributes are largely tempo- 



210 THE YOUNG IDEA 

rary and ephemeral in their nature. Both, 
perhaps, would agree upon the eternal na- 
ture of life's great experiences, but Mr. Le- 
doux has not remarked that the reaction to 
these experiences is a product of the special 
conditions of life in the age in which they 
achieve expression, and thus varies from age 
to age, while Miss Widdemer's implication 
is that we live in a peculiarly self-conscious 
time, and that we are therefore anxious to 
analyze our individual reactions to life. Mr. 
Ledoux reproaches contemporary writers 
for expressing too great an interest in the 
contemporary aspects of life; Miss Widde- 
mer tells us that the poet of today is inter- 
ested in just those things which make today 
different from yesterday, and has no thought 
of eternity. 

There is, moreover, a further difference of 
opinion between the Conservatives and the 
Radicals, centering upon the question of 
technical innovations. In general, the Con- 
servatives agree that a greater freedom of 
poetic form will undoubtedly result in an in- 



CONCLUSION 211 

fluence for the good upon poetic diction; 
what they object to is the anarchy of the 
present. Both Conservatives and Radicals 
seem to be united in a suspicion of "schools" ; 
and among all the contributions, only four 
could with absolute certainty be referred to 
definite movements. Those of Miss Lowell 
and Mr. Fletcher belong by right to the 
Imagist movement, although neither of the 
poets have discussed the specific tenets of 
that school in their contributions. Miss Anne 
Knish, who, with Mr. Emmanuel Morgan, 
represents the Spectrist group, is slightly 
contemptuous of our latter-day search for 
novelty, and explains Spectrism as a fresh 
interpretation of Classic gospels. Mr. Don- 
ald Evans, whose "Sonnets from the Pata- 
gonian" resulted in his being credited with 
the foundation of another school, does not 
mention its existence, and places his own 
work as being midway between the Radicals 
and the Conservatives in temper. 

But although the existence of all sorts of 
movements is denied, there is, in a wider 



212 THE YOUNG IDEA 

sense, a distinct movement in contemporary 
American letters, having as its basis the com- 
mon ideal of a determination to express a re- 
action to experience in terms of the thoughts 
and feelings of our own time and country. 
The methods by which this is being accom- 
plished are largely individual, and are told 
in the statements of the writers who have re- 
sponded to this investigation of their ideals ; 
any repetition here would be both redundant 
and impertinent. Any investigation of this 
nature must necessarily be incomplete in its 
results. One cannot mobilize all contempo- 
rary writers for an expression of opinion; 
there are several whose absence, for one rea- 
son or another, from this volume is heartily 
to be deplored. But investigations such as 
this have the virtue of bringing together a 
number of varied and representative points 
of view with reference to certain specific 
questions which are of fundamental import- 
ance in appraising the value of our literary 
activity. And therefore I believe this little 
book will have its place in criticism as a rec- 



CONCLUSION 213 

ord of the spirit and the ideals and the ideas 
underlying the work of American writers 
who are coming into their own in the present 
day. 

Lloyd R. Morris. 



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